We’ve reached that time of year again where Coca Cola are advertising like crazy, people start wearing ridiculous jumpers, and the music in shops go from playing the latest hits to dance around the tree classics. Yep, we’re approaching Christmas and the start of a brand-new year; it’s at times like this we start to get reflective. This year, our Director of Horus Music Nina has compiled our highlights, throwbacks, and the latest and greatest Horus Music news as we wrap up 2022 and reflect on another successful year.
Without a doubt the highlight of the year must be our takeover of The Tempest Inn at Brighton’s The Great Escape festival. On Thursday 12th May, The Tempest Inn transformed into Horus Music House, an important hub for the music industry conference and festival goers. We hosted a stellar line up of industry speakers including representatives from our partners at VEVO and SoundCloud, who participated in panel discussions and Q&A’s, taking a deep dive into current industry trends and the latest services on offer. Playing host to a networking event which welcomed a diverse mix of industry heads, we opened our doors to the wider public to for an intimate performance from 4 of our hardworking and talented artists, which resulted in us even having to turn some punters away as we were way over capacity! Going into 2023, we’re excited to be partnering with The Great Escape once again to bring you Horus Music House. Keep an eye on our socials for further updates going into the new year including speaker and artist announcements!
As a company, we’re pleased to have had many internal promotions this year and also a large number of new team members join the Horus Music family as we continue to build and develop. Our development team are an ever-growing crucial part of the Horus Music team and as a music tech company, we aim to have half of our work force focussed in the tech department. Playing an essential role in our day to day workings including development and upgrades of our systems, we were delighted to welcome to the team:
Moustafa Elgammal – Senior Developer
Erdem Durdu – Senior Developer
Milos Stojanovic – Senior Developers
Guilherme Campara – Front End Developer
Mauricio Loayza – Senior Back End Web Developer
Mridul Sehgal – Tester
Mladen Kostadinov – Systems Admin
An essential part of the work we do is taking on board feedback from our clients to provide you with the best possible service and we’re pleased to say, we’ve heard you and we’ve listened! 2023 will bring you new features including payment splitting at artist level so you can pay your collaborators, a brand new app that will sit alongside the current My Music Distribution Zone and My Music Account Zone apps within My Client Zone and finally; integrated smart links for all artists, for free! We’ll even be including an option to upgrade to purchase more marketing services directly within your account.
Continuing the marketing theme; this year we opened our marketing service Brasil Calling; to international artists outside of the Brazilian music market. Offered in-house, this service provides promotion to artists by directly pitching your music to key industry players at digital publications such as AfroPop, Sounds and Colours and independent online radio stations around the world including college radio in America. Recent success includes our artist Amai Kuda Et Les Bois whose figures went from 0 audience in Brazil to it being her top market on Spotify and second on Apple Music, all through our Brasil Calling service. If you’re interested in breaking into the Brazilian market in 2023, get in touch with our team for more information.
Hope Chiguvo is another new hire for this year and has taken Rosa’s place as Client Manager in the distribution team. You can expect regular contact from Hope who is on hand to support you for all your My Client Zone and distribution needs.
We’re pleased to have officially welcomed Rosa to the marketing team as our Digital Marketing Manager and your go to girl for all things marketing. Rosa has a vast amount of knowledge and contacts in the blogging and PR space, so it made sense for us to launch a brand-new in-house PR service. Not only has Rosa pitched independent artists to secure press features as part of an Indie label, she’s also sat on both sides with over 3 years’ experience working as a journalist at numerous publications, where she selected artists and releases to feature. Our in-house PR service is currently only being offering to existing Horus Music clients and even better, at a heavily discounted rate! It even includes the creation of a Digital Press One Sheet (more on that later) and genre permitting, send outs via our Brasil Calling service. If you want to try and get your music onto blogs such as Pitchfork, The Independent, Rolling Stone or DIY mag, then get in touch before we officially launch to the public and the prices increases.
We find that PR and playlisting perfectly goes hand in hand and our direct partnerships with DSPs mean that we can provide a range of editorial playlist pitching services for our artists. Part of the process of us pitching requires us to supply a press release and with many artists we work with being totally independent, we designed a new Digital Press One Sheet (DPOS) package to help support our artists and provide them with a vital tool to navigate all areas of the music industry. Our digital press one sheets are written and designed by our professional in-house team, tailored to your brand and can be used to highlight an upcoming release or represent general information about you as an artist. With interactive links incorporated, the finished product can be utilised for press, sending to prominent industry figures and for live purposes, with the information easily extractable to update your profiles across social media platforms and digital stores such as Spotify. Clients who’ve used our DPOS service in tandem with our playlist pitching services have seen a significant increase in the number of placements they’ve landed. Some of our artists have further utilised their DPOS to secure international festival slots, been scooped up by record labels and even had discussions with music managers to help further their career.
If you’re interested in our PR or marketing services, contact Rosa for further information or complete our marketing form to submit your music direct.
Horus Music continues to remain one of the few fully independent, privately owned distributors and with that, we continue to build and expand our network of platforms around the world. This year, we’ve renewed our contracts with Wynk Music, a key DSP in the Indian music market and signed new deals with Garuda Indonesia – Airline, Stationhead, Utopia, Homewav and MusixMatch.
Clients on our artist and label services model have also benefitted from our new international collaboration matchmaking service where we look at all of the different artists on our roster and connect them with other artists across the globe to create some new releases, which we can then help promote and release. If you’re on our artist and label services roster and haven’t yet taken advantage of this new service, please reach out to your rep who’ll be happy to share the form with you to add your details. If you’re a music producer from Tanzania looking to connect with a female vocalist from France, or simply looking for more artists to collaborate with in your region, we’ve got you covered.
Some of the recent collaborations we’ve facilitated include:
Nigeria and UK – Ibejii & Afrikan Boy.
Ghana and Nigeria- Benny Afroe & Singah
We’ve continued to support our new and existing clients in securing artist advances on their back catalogues. With a varying mix of genres, we’re pleased to have locked in this service for electronic soul artist Dornik, electronic dance duo K Theory and indie rock band Fuzzy Sun. If you’re interested in joining our artist and label services or looking to secure an artist advance, head over to our artist and label services page for more info and to submit your application.
Thank you to all our artists, labels, partners, collaborators and team for another incredible year at Horus Music. We have some big plans for 2023, so make sure you sign up to our newsletter and follow us on social media for all the latest updates from Horus HQ!
