Latest Innovation Enables Artists and Labels to Harness Real-Time Sales Analytics via an Intuitive Web Interface
NEW YORK & AUSTIN,
Texas (Top40 Charts/ Orchard Records) - The Orchard, a global leader in digital music, video and new media services, today announced at the South By Southwest (SXSW)
Music Conference the launch of an innovative, next-generation business-to-business tool set called the Artist/Label Workstation (ALW). The ALW offers Orchard's artist and label clients with powerful online administration and reporting tools, creatively deploying an array of Web 2.0 feature sets, and empowering a new level of control over catalogue and new release management, digital marketing reporting and analysis, accounting administration and royalty analysis.
Further, the ALW offers a one-stop resource for Orchard's clients to manage their participation in the myriad services Orchard offers, such as turn-key synchronization licensing support, automatic feeds for integrated marketing campaigns, and 'demo builders' to enable Orchard to easily support its brand and agency clients who increasingly look to The Orchard to power their non-traditional marketing campaigns.
The ALW is the latest in a series of proprietary label relations, music discovery, and delivery technologies developed by The Orchard over the last year, including the proprietary, in-house V.E.C.T.O.R music, mastertone and video management and delivery platform.
'The Orchard's Artist/Label Workstation is an unprecedented source of analysis for our growing catalog of more than 40,000 tracks, and helps us better understand what, where and how our consumers are downloading music,' said Brian Perera, founder of Cleopatra Records. 'It's enabling us to build better-selling digital compilations to give the consumers what they really want. The Orchard has done a marvelous job with the Workstation, and I truly believe that it will help our company's growth in 2008.'
For the web interface design, The Orchard tapped Webby Award-winning firm Fluidesign to ensure an intuitive and striking interface to match the power of the engine behind the HTML.
'Managing multiple artists, releases, formats, and all the marketing and set-up logistics of running a record label is challenging with our small staff,' explains Paul Hanly of Frenchkiss Records. 'The Orchard's ALW allows us to quickly add new releases online, view our weekly iTunes activity, and watch how our artists and releases are selling in an easy to digest format - allowing us to concentrate on taking care of our artists.'
In addition to the suite of account management services the ALW provides, The Orchard's labels and artists benefit from access to advanced marketing tools built seamlessly into the ALW fold. From within the ALW, labels can order promotional and retail download cards through Drop Cards, as well as create viral fan widgets known as 'gydgets' through integration with Gydget. In order to direct product investments where they deliver the most tangible value to artist and label clients, The Orchard regularly seeks client feedback, often at events such SXSW. In addition to a full slate of label working sessions, Orchard's team will cheer on over 100 Orchard-distributed acts that have been invited to hit the stage at the festival. Sample tracks from 15 of these artists are showcased on The Orchard's new Selector Series release, Don't Mess With Texas: SXSW 2008 New Music Sampler.
'The Orchard continues to innovate, arming our clients to take full advantage of this fertile time in the transformation of the music industry,' said Greg Scholl, president and chief executive of The Orchard. 'The ALW will help to redefine what clients should expect in online client service tools in the digital age, with a fully-interactive �widget'-based dashboard, a simple 3-step release-building module, an intuitive revenue and sales analysis toolkit, and simple, powerful royalty reporting. Our mantra remains unchanged: invest to innovate, so our artists and labels can build and monetize audiences.'
About The Orchard
The Orchard controls and globally distributes more than one million songs and over 4,000 hours of video programming through hundreds of digital stores (e.g. iTunes, eMusic, Google, Netflix) and mobile carriers (e.g. Verizon, Vodafone, Bell Canada, Moderati, 3). With operations in 28 countries, The Orchard drives sales for its label, retailer, brand, and agency clients through innovative marketing and promotional campaigns; brand entertainment programs; and film, advertising, gaming and television licensing. A pioneer in digital music and media services, The Orchard fosters creativity and independence. For more information, please visit us at www.theorchard.com.
The Orchard is a registered trademark and The Orchard logo is a service mark of Orchard Enterprises NY, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
