By ‘Dayo Showemimo
Nigerian Entertainment Today (NET) has announced the launch of ORIN, a music service that will help the world access Nigerian and African music faster and help artists and labels reach new audiences in addition to providing uninterrupted entertainment to the millions of young people around the world who are passionate about Nigerian music. With plans to revolutionize the audiovisual streaming experience and business model for the considerable African music market, ORIN merges the best features of established streaming service providers with social functionality and data gathering and analytics functions.
The new music service was announced by Founder, Ayeni Adekunle at the Nigerian Entertainment Conference today, Wednesday, April 22, 2015. Boasting a library made up of 100% African content, ORIN is targeted at the African music listener, with over 5,000 audio tracks and 1,000 videos already present on this rapidly expanding library. In the next 12 months, the audio library is expected to surpass 100,000 tracks as new content and older content in non-digital formats are added. Available on PC, Android, iOS and Windows Phone platforms, ORIN is making a deliberate play to capture the rapidly expanding market of Africans with a smartphone or a personal computer with internet access.
Combining the functionality of established streaming services like Spotify, ORIN which provides Music on the Go incorporates social media functionality into its unique experience, resulting in a three-way merger of content streaming, social connections and conversations and data analytics and content marketing tools. All this useful and wide-ranging functionality is brought together under a delightfully simple user interface which is reminiscent of a typical everyday social networking site.
At the heart of ORIN is user customization. Rather than algorithm-generated playlists or paid music curators, users organize and structure their own playlists making use of the vast music and video library. This service is 100% free to use as ORIN is backed by advertising revenue and it even pays royalties to artistes. The result of this is a deceptively simple-looking website and app which has almost infinite possibilities under the mask of a user-friendly interface.
No doubt taking into account the high cost of mobile data packages and often-sluggish connection speeds in Africa, ORIN incorporates online and offline streaming modes which permit users to listen to their playlists offline without downloading mp3 files which deprive artistes of royalties. It also incorporates automatic detection of connection speed and assigns streaming bandwidth accordingly, so for example a fast connection is assigned a bandwidth of 256kbps and a slower connection may be assigned 128kbps or 64kbps, with special formatting to avoid audible loss of audio quality.
A useful geo-location feature is embedded in ORIN to give artistes, labels and brands a picture of the geographical spread of content, which helps in decisions regarding recording, touring and marketing communication. Even upcoming artists are able to make use of the social media functionality to popularize their music and earn some money in the process.
ORIN is an exciting and unprecedented development in the African music industry. If successful, it will not only deliver the best streaming experience available to the African market, but will also change the definition of social media and blur the lines between social networking and multimedia content use.
BREAKING: NET launches ORIN Streaming Service: Music On The GO!
