Richard Gottehrer and Scott Cohen start The Orchard in New York City’s Lower East Side to provide independent artists the ability to sell their music to mainstream audiences.

The Orchard opens European headquarters in London.

iTunes launches and The Orchard delivers the largest catalog of independent music in the world into the service.

Physical wholesaler Valley Media goes out of business, taking The Orchard’s CD inventory with it and thrusting the company into digital distribution.

The Orchard becomes the first independent digital distributor to hit one million paid downloads.

The Orchard launches a licensing division placing clients’ music into films, television, advertisements, games and elsewhere.

The Orchard begins to digitally distribute video, and is among YouTube’s first monetization partners and iTunes’ first independent film deals.

The Orchard enhances its client dashboard with the Release Builder content management system, marketing and analytics tools.

The Orchard gets back into physical distribution via the acquisition of TVT Records, increasing its distribution reach across all retail channels and bolstering its owned repertoire.

Deloitte ranks The Orchard as the 66th fastest growing technology company in North America, ahead of Sirius, Constant Contact and RIM (Research in Motion).

Pitbull’s single “Krazy,” distributed by The Orchard, is certified gold.

Brad Navin becomes CEO of The Orchard.

Photo by Rachel Cabitt

The Orchard Marketplace debuts with 20 sales and marketing tools from hand-picked third-party partners.

The Orchard Sports launches with a catalog of gripping action sports videos.

Adding a new revenue stream for clients, The Orchard begins to offer Neighboring Rights/Public Performance Royalty Collection, utilizing its global reach to collect directly from societies around the world.

IODA, Iris and The Orchard become one to lead the global digital distribution landscape.

With 15 years of valuable data at its fingertips, The Orchard adds YouTube, Facebook, Amazon and Spotify to Analytics, joining iTunes and more than 10 others.

Goodbye to bulky hard drives. Film clients now use Film Builder to deliver feature length films to The Orchard.

The Orchard celebrates a top-ranked video network and launches B.A.C.O.N. to support its growth.

The Orchard opens offices in Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney and Singapore.

The Orchard Sports relaunches as Echoboom Sports with a slick new look and mind-bending content.

The Orchard enters an exclusive partnership with Scholastic, the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books.

The Orchard unveils the Workstation in 5 new languages for a total of 9 supported languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, Russian and Italian.

BalconyTV, Frenchkiss Records and Frenchkiss Label Group join The Orchard family.

The Orchard hits the big screen with its first theatrical release, Rich Hill, the Grand Jury Prize Winner of Sundance 2014.

Richard Gottehrer gets awarded SESAC’s “Visionary Award” for his 50+ years of invaluable contributions to the music industry.

The Orchard becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment, continuing to operate independently within the Sony family.

The Duplass brothers granted The Orchard worldwide rights to release 7 upcoming films in theaters, digital, cable, airlines and DVD.

The Orchard signs deals with 4 of the top action sports studios in North America — Brain Farm, Teton Gravity Research, Fanclub Media and Nitro Circus — making it the uncontested leader in action sports entertainment.

The Orchard Workstation now features a Master Rights Management tool to facilitate Performance Rights revenue claims and opportunities.

The Orchard continues to celebrate 20 years of distribution done right.