ORASTREAM
CEO: FRANKIE TAN COUNTRY: SINGAPORE STARTED: 2011
What’s your origin story? My name is Frankie Tan, and I am the CEO of OraStream. We started with a mission,
taking inspiration from the words of Margaret Mead, who said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
Music – restore lossless and high-resolution audio in their services. What are you working on now? We continue to focus on mainstream digital music services, to adopt high-fidelity distribution, and give consumers choice in how they consume music. OraStream is also working on restoring music videos and livestreaming audio. Audio quality has been the poor cousin in video
world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” We dedicated ourselves to restoring digital audio quality, to making music sound better for listeners everywhere, by developing the technology for lossless audio access, regardless of bandwidth or device. But this ideal wasn’t widely shared at the time we took our proprietary technology to the industry. High-fidelity audio wasn’t ten times cheaper or better than regular MP3 quality. There was one single artist who cared greatly about the sound quality of music and whose life-long goal had been to restore high-quality audio. That was legendary singer-songwriter, Neil Young. Young used OraStream’s technology to build an entirely new and unique music distribution model, via the Neil Young Archives (NYA). NYA showed how to marry digital music convenience, without sacrificing audio quality. Digital music can now be distributed in the highest fidelity (like the original performance) and consumed on any device or network – something that hadn’t been done for 20 years. This turned out to be world-changing, as we’ve since watched digital distributors – including Amazon Music and Apple
streaming for the last decade. We recently powered a classical concert, livestreamed in high-resolution audio. It was a great example of a hybrid model for the
future of live musical and arts productions. OraStream is partnering with organisations needing to add a high-fidelity streaming component to their live events. What’s next? We’re encouraged to see the NYA not only distribute digital music differently; it is also a different model generally, one that is led by the artists (and less by record labels). Artist-led distribution is critically important for those that are under-represented. If you could have anything right now, what would that be? More individuals like Neil Young, who dare to do things differently.
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