New streaming service ORIN launched in Nigeria

The new music service was announced by its founder, Ayeni Adekunle, at the Nigerian Entertainment Conference in Lagos on Wednesday 22 April.

With plans to revolutionize the audio-visual streaming experience and business model for the growing African music market, ORIN merges the best features of established streaming service providers with social functionality and data gathering and analytics functions.

Boasting a library made up of 100% African content, ORIN is targeted at the African music listener, with over 5000 audio tracks and 1000 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 personal computer with internet access.

Combining the functionality of established streaming services like Spotify, ORIN 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 simple user interface reminiscent of a typical 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 artists. The result of this is a deceptively simple-looking website and app with numerous possibilities.

No doubt taking into account the high cost of mobile data packages and often-sluggish connection speeds in Africa, ORIN incorporates online as well as offline streaming modes that permit users to listen to their playlists offline without downloading mp3 files that deprive artists of royalties. It also incorporates automatic detection of connection speed and assigns streaming bandwidth accordingly, with special formatting to avoid loss of audio quality. A useful geo-location feature is embedded in ORIN to give artists, 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 new 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. Users can sign up at orin.ng.