Genres

Playlist of the Week (2018/23)

This week’s POTW is Lis from Adra Sengué, who is from the beautiful Baden-Württemberg region of Germany, which I have happy memories of visiting on several occasions.  (There’s also an almost-parallel playlist on Soundcloud). Adra is a music fan and also manager at Rogalist Records, an independent electronica record label. Rogalist, in its own words, focusses on “electronic music oriented to psychedelic dub deephouse with world & jazz influences and acoustic elements”. As that’s a bit of a mouthful, it’s probably easier to just have a listen to what they produce; there’s some pretty cool and interesting music!

This playlist features artists that work with the Rogalist label, such as Spaceschneider and Dephinite, as well as a huge variety of other independent artists. (You may recognise some of the artists’ names if you’ve been following Playlist of the Week for a while!)

 

 

 

Playlist of the Week (2018/22)

This week’s POTW is Elegant Electronic Music, compiled by Roz RK, aka Resonanz Kreis. In this playlist, RK has pulled together a great collection of tracks from across the world of electronica, encompassing genres as diverse as chillhop, EBM, ambient, synthwave and plenty of tracks that I couldn’t quite assign to a particular genre*.   Some of the tracks make for more challenging listening, but overall this is a good playlist to put on whilst you get on with a few hours of work, as it feels rather like a film soundtrack.

Roz is an electronic artist based in Northern Italy and Resonanz Kreis is a solo project that has been going for about 20 years, but is a relatively recent discovery for me, via the loose network of independent musicians in contact on social media. Resonanz Kreis’s best work has an uncluttered simplicity with hints of classic electronica from such artists as Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Enigma. I’d especially recommend My Silence if you like tracks by Enigma, or T.F.L.D. if you like a slightly more experimental sound, like this one by the Flying Lizards.

 

*Disclaimer: I’m pretty rubbish with genres: the electronica scene is always coming up with new genre names and their meanings shift over time. If I tried to keep up 100%, I’d not have any time left for making music!

Playlist of the Week (2018/15)

This week’s POTW, The 100 – Electronic is another from the Atom Collector Records stable, and exclusively features independent electronic artists, some of whom you will have already heard in previous weeks’ POTWs, if you’ve been following the series so far. There is a broad range of genres within the list, even though it is restricted to ‘electronic’ music.

Support such as this is invaluable for getting my music heard by new audiences, and the same will go for the other artists who feature: we all really appreciate a helping hand. At the time of writing, this playlist is still a way off the 100 tracks planned, so do go back to listen again if you like what you hear: providing it doesn’t reach 100 in the meantime, there will be more tracks for you to discover later.

Playlist of the Week (2018/13)

This week’s POTW is the wonderfully named Keep Calm and Walk with the Elephant*, from Iced Note Music.   The Elephant in the title is a reference to Elephant State, which is a band in Iced Note’s stable and who have some tracks included on the playlist – I particularly like the driving Heritage.

The playlist has a broad variety of electronic music from electro house to noise, as well as tracks from other genres, so there should be something in there to please most listeners.

*No animals were harmed in the writing of this blogpost.

 

Playlist of the Week (2018/12)

This week’s POTW comes from Russell Suereth. Russ creates spiritual new age music and you can best hear his work via another playlist of his, Enigma and Russell Suereth.

Russ’s Freshly Picked Selections playlist is an eclectic mixed bag, as far as genres are concerned, but the common theme throughout these songs is that Russ has championed unsigned artists.

Disclaimer: there are a few songs in this list with the ‘explicit’ label. If that is likely to cause offence, please do use the skip button when these come up!

 

What alternatives are there to Soundcloud? (Part 3: Orfium)

This is the third installment in the series, exploring where independent musicians can make their music available to the public.

Orfium platform music discovery

Orfium platform music discovery

Orfium

The concept behind Orfium is the one-stop-shop and they are pitching themselves as the ‘answer to Soundcloud’. They have been around since 2016, and are a social network where you can also sell and monetize your music. The platform is effectively designed to be something like Soundcloud meets CDBaby. (Which would incidentally make a great combination if CDBaby were to get hold of Soundcloud.)

There’s no upfront or hosting cost. Orfium keep 20% of the revenue, if you decide to sell tracks through them rather than offer them for free. That means they are keeping 5% more than Bandcamp and CDBaby Free. On the plus side, Orfium can do more for you, as they can handle publishing, sync licensing, and YouTube monetisation, which aren’t part of the Bandcamp or CDBaby Free services.  (CD Baby can cover this, but you pay a fixed upfront fee to upgrade to either its ‘standard’ or ‘pro’ services, depending on your needs.)

So keen are Orfium to win over Soundcloud users that they have an ‘import from Soundcloud’ feature, however it only works with tracks that you’ve made available for download from Soundcloud.  There are not very many users just yet – charting tracks have a relatively small number of listens, which are currently dominated by a few bands; the ‘popular new music’ list mostly consists of tracks with less than a handful of plays. Electronic music dominates the site currently, possibly because this genre tends to adopt new tech early.

Pros:
-A very well-designed, professional-looking site.
-No upfront fees.
-If you make remixes, they can be featured alongside the originals.
-There’s a playlisting feature; playlists can be set to be public or private.
-They also cover Facebook monetisation.
-If your fans play your tracks on the site, you could gain the attention of other site users simply through being a relatively early adopter of the site.
-You can set external links to another site where you sell a track, instead of via Orfium.

Cons:
-If you want to sell through the site you could end up paying more in the long run than selling via a service with a fixed upfront fee, like CDBaby Standard, if you expect to make a lot of sales.
-There’s no app for it just yet (although they say there is one on the way).
-Downloads sold through the site are currently only available as mp3, not lossless files (although Orfium’s FAQs state that they plan to offer lossless later).
-A 20% charge on sales is a bit on the steep side. You’d have to weigh up whether you stand to gain overall via the additional sources of monetisation available like Facebook. Royalties/sales are also only paid to artists via Paypal or Payoneer, and in USD, so if you’re outside the States, expect additional fees.

Verdict:
This looks like a good site with a lot of potential, but it needs more music fans to use it. I don’t see it as a direct replacement to Soundcloud, as it seems better geared up for fully finished recordings, as it also offers distribution services.  The social side of the service seems more like a nice add-on to its distribution service at the moment, rather than being the core benefit, but that should change as more fans start to use the site. It is currently slightly better suited for electronic musicians, because there appear to be more electronic artists using the site, who will be bringing their fans to visit. Consider selling downloads through your own website, but using Orfium as the shop window, to lower your costs and to offer lossless quality files to listeners.