Orfium

The second artist in THE ORFIUM X MAGNETIC MAG PROJECT is David Jorre. South African born and raised, David now lives in London where he finds the soul of techno. 

Being a relatively independent artist, you juggle many roles and responsibilities. When it comes time to book your own tour, it’s not just one responsibility to add to your list of things to do. If you’re lucky, you have some partners/bandmates that will tag along and help you plan. If you’re alone, you’re wearing all of the hats. Regardless of how many of you there are, it’s always going to be harder work than a loaded manager that can financially and resourcefully book your tour for you.

Below are a few tips on how to successfully plan, book, and go on your own tour.

1. Make sure your assets are as up-to-date as possible

When it comes to marketing yourself for venues and promoters, you’ll need a clean, current website, social media presence, and media kit. Maybe it’s time for a new photo shoot and a couple blog posts here and there. You want to market yourself as effectively as possible, so be prepared because venues will rely on these resources.

2. Plan with many months in mind

If you can swing a sweet gig at an awesome venue last minute, snag it if it all possible. However, more likely than not, you’ll need to plan months in advance for which venues you’re playing in which order. Plan your route. This gives you enough time to get a good day and time slot, plan for travel time and accommodations, and prep your website, social media, and tour announcements. While you’re at it, do your research on these venues and towns/cities. Social media can really help out with this planning item.

3. Book your opening acts with local artists

These artists most likely have a following, whether big or small. They can show you the ropes with the venue, help promote you, and serve as a good contact while you’re still on the other side of the country.

4. Schedule free time

It’s pretty obvious but you’ll definitely want to jam-pack your tour with shows. However, free time is important. Give yourself/yourselves at least a day, an evening, a weekend to explore, take a nap, rest up, and eat a real meal (not just PBR and well tequila shots at the show). Rest time is important for performing your best and keeping your mental state sane.

5. Raise (or get) money

Food, mileage, lodging, drinks, and general cash are all things you’ll need to not only account for but plan for. Try to raise as much money as possible to bring with you so you don’t have to scrounge or ball on a budget. Sleeping in the van isn’t as cool as it appears.

6. Be professional and courteous

Follow up with the venue after booking. Confirming doors, set times, and venue protocols is not only smart planning, it’s professional and the venue will appreciate it. While you’re there, you and your fan base need to be courteous. Don’t get outrageously drunk and destroy the place. Respect it, the venue is doing you a favor (at this point in your career).

7. Hype

You’re about to go on your, you should be excited! And so should your fans. Post frequently on social media, hype up your tour. Tweet from the road, send photos, and check in at venues. It shows your excitement and gets others excited for the show.

8. Keep in touch

You’ve finished your tour and you absolutely killed it. Keep in touch with the venues and all of the people you met along the way. It’s not only professional and courteous, it keeps you top-of-mind when it comes to booking more shows. Thank venues for their space and staff, they work hard too.

Social media is the closest thing to free advertising artists can have. It’s very easy to post, answer questions, and share your music and music friends’ music to create a following and network of genre-based music. It’s also easy to fatigue your followers.

Striking the right balance of “I’m awesome” and “I’m modest” is difficult, especially when it comes to your art. It’s even more difficult to do so without flooding their newsfeeds and warranting unfollows and even worse - bashing.

We have 3 easy but imperative tips for not exhausting your followers’, or potential followers’, newsfeeds while still engaging them and growing your social presence and following.

1. Post genuinely

Playing “too cool for school” is too blasé on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. No one wants to follow an artist who thinks they’ve already discovered the next best thing in music months or years ago. That’s not too exciting. But posting aggressive, ALL CAPS posts is too much. You look like a 14 year old DJ in his parent’s basement super stoked about the fact that he just made his first song in Abelton AND figured out how to upload and share it. Modesty is key here.

Genuinely post about your new track or something exciting that happened to you as an artist. If you’re excited, you should be - but don’t flood their newsfeeds with something obnoxious. You don’t need to write your life’s story in a Facebook post, in fact, just don’t do it. But expressing that this track is personally exciting for you is enough to pique the interest of followers.

Even if your update is not too exciting, continue to post genuinely. No, “Eh, I don’t really know about this one, I think it kinda sucks ;p,” but a genuine post like “I just made this new track, I’m excited to share it with you all. Let me know what you think,” still keeps followers’ interest in check.

Be genuine, post genuinely, and don’t make posts like the insincere ones that annoy you. Remember, you should be grateful for your fans and their support, so speak to them as your friends, not your subjects.

2. Interaction and engagement

It’s often that you’ll see an artist page or profile that has a few hundred followers here and there but doesn’t post much to interact with its followers. Keep an eye on these types of profiles and you’ll notice that the follower count drops or comments and likes dissipate.

It’s important to make your posts, your entire page, really, as interactive as possible. Interaction drives follower engagement, inside and outside of the social profile. By interactive, we mean prompts for comments, shares, likes, personal anecdotes, etc. Followers love to interact with the artist. Interaction doesn’t mean just post a comment, it means receiving a comment back. Social media platforms are basically the closest you’ll get to an artist outside of the venue. They’ll interact with you if you offer it.

Community engagement is most important. Take the time to respond to your followers. Not only will it light up their day, it’ll peg you as a humble artist. You can’t just ask an artist to interact with your post and not acknowledge the fact that they did so.

There are two things to remember when considering interaction with your followers:

A. Interacting with your follower engagement means they might just check back in on your profile.

B. It might prompt shares and interaction by people outside of your followers that then convert to followers.

No one is too busy for social media, use yours wisely.

3. Incentivize your followers or potential followers

Our third and final tip dovetails our second social media tip: incentivize.

Incentivizing your audience means a number of things. The first, you are way more likely for people to interact with your posts if you offer them some sort of incentive. Everyone wants that carrot on the stick.

Secondly, it offers a chance for your followers to share your post, opening your post and thus your profile for people that don’t yet follow you. Everyone loves to show what they’ve acquired on Facebook. A cool incentive from an awesome artist is share-worthy. These shares show other users that they too have a chance at this incentive and this artist was way cool for offering this to me.

Finally, it drives your followers to engage with you on another level, claiming some sort of prize from one of their favorite artists. It’s more than just asking your followers what their favorite album artwork is. It’s another thing to ask them this and offer a signed copy of the album to the random winner.

It’s very important to remember to keep these incentives realistic. Don’t promise a trip to LA and a night out with you at a club unless you’re willing to dish out some serious cash to do so. What’s worse than finding yourself in a financial bind? Lying to your fans and not following through.

You also don’t want to offer incentives that aren’t realistic in terms of your time. Nothing too in-depth. No, “share your life story with me and I’ll pick my favorite,” that leaves you spending hours reading countless stories and subjectively finding your favorite and frivolously discarding your least favorite.

Manageable, realistic incentives that say “thank you” to your followers are the perfect kind of incentives to keep people sharing, interacting, and engaging.

Social media can be one of your most powerful, least cost-intensive modes of advertising yourself as an artist. It’s a careful, yet easy art, once mastered. Everybody loves their fans, share the love with them personally on social media platforms.

Follow Orfium on our social media platforms for more insights into being a successful digital artist, your artist rights, and ways to get more monetarily out of your music.

Facebook

Twitter

Recently at Orfium, we’ve been receiving a lot of outreach from artists, listeners, and appreciators alike. We truly can’t thank everyone enough.

With all of that being said, we’re excited to announce that we’re going to start featuring artists on our blog, Facebook, and Instagram. We appreciate one another - everyone’s grind toward work and determination - which is why you guys should check out their tracks! 

We’ll be featuring artists weekly so you can hear a bit more about them, their tracks, and view their profiles.

What better way to hear new music than supporting artists that believe in the importance of fair and accessible music?

We oftentimes are asked where our mobile app is and what features it will hold. Although we can’t promise an official launch date, we can confirm that our app is in the works!

Our desktop version is the horse and our app is the cart. We need a functional desktop platform for artists to upload music before we can take Orfium on the go for listening or content management. Luckily, the app will operate a lot like the desktop version. The only difference here is that we’ll actually be providing local storage on your phone, so you can download music and listen to it offline!

So artists, you will still be able to view your play count, followers, downloads, etc. and listeners, you’ll still be able to listen, follow artists and playlists, and discover new music all on the go.

It’s the biggest question we receive and that’s the honest answer. So don’t worry, it’s on it’s way, but the cart has to catch up to the horse first!

With 1.3 billion users, it’s no wonder that 40% of all online music consumption comes from YouTube. With YouTube’s content id service, you can collect royalties from every video that contains your music on YouTube!

How does YouTube Content ID work?

The process is simple and fruitful. Upload your music to generate a digital fingerprint of your music through Orfium (make sure to select “YouTube Monetization”). With the digital fingerprint, any video that contains your music will be identified and claimed, and then YouTube will begin running ads around the videos. Every time an ad is viewed, you get a percentage of that revenue.

Why use Orfium for YouTube content ID?

As a rights administrator with a direct deal with YouTube and an 80% artist payout, Orfium can ensure you get paid royalties from every video that contains your music. With no upfront cost, no long-term contracts, and monthly royalty pay outs, Orfium supports artists with freedom and transparency that helps your music career prosper.

Be smart - collect money from YouTube.

Nine out of ten independent artists are not collecting royalties from YouTube, don’t be one of them. Get the credit and money you deserve from others using your music in their videos.

In addition to YouTube Content ID, Orfium also offers Facebook monetization, royalty free licensing, digital distribution, remix monetization, and publishing administration services. We’re big on artist rights. You can opt in or out of all of our services at anytime with no fear that your music is held captive.

Tremendous respect is due to SoundCloud. They paved the way for digital music in a complex industry that is notorious for resisting change and yet still managed to build an incredible community. Unfortunately, it looks like that pioneering has taken its toll. Yesterday, SoundCloud disclosed it lost €51 million Euros in 2015, and is slated to run out of money by the year’s end. It would be a tremendous blow to the music world if SoundCloud goes down, and SoundCloud users need to prepare for this potential reality by backing up their music. 

The good news: Orfium offers unlimited free hosting and has a direct import from SoundCloud feature. Orfium also offers artists an 80% revenue split, and there are never any upfront costs or long-term contracts.

Some of the features available on Orfium include: YouTube monetization, direct sales to fans, micro-licensing, creating and sharing playlists, and much more. Some of the features artists can look forward to in the near future on Orfium include: subscription streaming, remix monetization, Facebook monetization, digital distribution, and publishing administration.

Orfium’s number one objective is to empower artists and it is our philosophy that artists should always control how their music is consumed and distributed. We are always open to collaborate with others who share this vision, including SoundCloud.

With the evolution of music consumption, it’s no doubt that music streaming has surfaced, bewildered, and then optimized itself as a result of scrutiny and expending. Whether a listener or artist, we all have our standards for populating a platform with our music or simply pressing ‘play.’ Enter Orfium.

Orfium wants nothing more than to provide a seamless streaming platform filled with whatever music you can imagine, all while providing higher-than-normal artist payouts.

Why not exercise your rights as an artist, reaping the benefits you deserve? And as a listener, why not explore an extensive library while knowing you are single-handedly supporting an artist more than Spotify or Soundcloud ever have or will?

Talking Business

As a verified user, you are able to monetize to the fullest extent, receiving 80% payout, a massive 60%-70% more than Soundcloud can ever give you.

Orfium truly and simply cares about your rights as an artist and wants you to have the freedom to do what you want with your content and get the money you deserve. We provide remix monetization, micro-licensing, Creative Commons licensing, and even YouTube monetization (more on that to come). You’re even able to set your own download limitations. It’s your music, you own it, you control it, and we can help.

We understand the convenience of having your music all in one place so we made it easier for you to import to Orfium and get the payment you deserve. You can import directly from Soundcloud and finally get the payment Soundcloud was holding out on.

There’s plenty more to explore and learn more about Orfium’s artists. This is the tip of the wealthiest artist iceberg you’ve ever seen. Learn more here.

Why Switch My Preferred Platform?

Is it really that great anyway? It could be, but does it pay and represent its artists and their rights like Orfium does? Absolutely not. And we’ll always try to be better, by the way.

Our platform is intuitive enough to create a profile, discover new music, follow artists, and grow your profile to be more of a tastemaker than just a listener. As a tastemaker, you can even follow albums and playlists.

Once you have built your profile and discovered new music, you can engage socially right on Orfium.com and really shoot for the stars on that tastemaker plan. People can interact with your playlists and you get the credit for finding that really obscure jimbe player before he was cool.

So what do we know about music streaming platforms and artists rights? A whole lot more than the other guys out there. So artists, upload your music and get the money and managed rights you deserve. Listeners, create the profile, discover the music, and interact with the people you want. We all have friends that love making music and deserve every bit of credit for it, so listen, share, enjoy, and get paid.

Hello Orfium Community!

We are excited to announce two new features on Orfium: a new account verification option through PayPal, and a Upload Manager that allows you to mass upload/update music on Orfium.

In this post I’ll provide an overview of the monetization options offered on Orfium and hopefully create a better understanding of what Orfium offers. I’ll follow up soon with a more comprehensive post for each monetization category.

An easy to way showcase your music on your personal website or blog is to simply embed it from Orfium. Examples below.

A single track:

A playlist:

We just set up a new YouTube channel for promoting Orfium and it’s users. We will be uploading interviews with Orfium artists and featuring their music. If you are interested in being a featured artist on our YouTube channel please contact us at [email protected]

Check out our first upload below:

Cheers!

We just rolled out an initial version of personalized music recommendations. We’ll admit it is a bit crude at the moment but now that the technological foundation is in place we can start dialing in more powerful algorithms.

Music videos and promotional videos are some of the most effective means to engage your audience and getting started is not as hard as you think. When we realized we needed to have a video made about Orfium we initially thought it would be complicated and expensive to do. Since we are a startup with limited resources we didn’t think we would be in position to produce a video for several months... that is until we met Dawn and Matt over at Creative Collision.

We updated the music discovery page. Now instead of all music being displayed in a single vertical feed it uses a tiled grid style with one row per category. We also added the top charts to this page.

You can see this new page at https://www.orfium.com/music/

We feel like this new interface makes it easier to view and sample more music than before and is better organized. We will also be making some incremental enhancements soon including additional categorizations such as free music vs paid music, personalized recommendations, and individual category discovery pages with rows of tiles for each subcategory.

Here we will keep you informed about what’s happening in the Music Industry. Check back soon!