This is a sponsored post from OpusAtlas that contains affiliate links.
Have you ever found yourself telling someone about a great opera performance you went to and that one singer you loved, but somehow you cannot remember that singer’s name to save your life? It’s frustrating! For films and TV shows, there’s IMDB. Now, OpusAtlas hopes to fill the same role for opera.
Still in its beta stage, OpusAtlas serves artists and audiences alike. Labeling itself as a “digital performance archive,” users can either search for or upload a wealth of information about performances, singers, companies, composers, conductors, and more. Let’s first dive into how audiences can use it to find performances, then we’ll talk about how to use it as an artist.
For Audiences
When you first access OpusAtlas, it defaults to a seemingly arbitrary selection of singers, companies, and operas. If you’re looking for something specific though, you can use the search bar at the top of the page. While you certainly can search for singers of the past to get a feel for their historical performances, the site often lists richer content for current performers since you can see their upcoming performances. Sometimes, the performer even manages their OpusAtlas page themselves (more on this in a bit), which ensures greater accuracy of the information.
In any case, each page – be it artists, companies, or what have you – offers the same content opportunities. It lists a biography, video content, upcoming performances along with their location and dates, and past performances with the same information. Each page also has a subscribe button so fans can receive information on upcoming performances. The bottom of the page also lists the artist’s website if viewers would like to learn more. To stay up to date on local opera performances, you can also create an account to save your location information.
For Artists
For artists, OpusAtlas provides a platform to share all of your performance information with your audience, such as upcoming engagements and videos. There are a couple of great advantages to using OpusAtlas in particular for this kind of content sharing.
The platform is easy to use and (currently) free. This makes it a great launching point for newer performers to create a space to connect with their audience when they’re not quite ready for a website. When listing performances, you can add those already listed on OpusAtlas, or adding your own if they’re not already available on the site. It is worth noting that when you search a performance already listed, you need to go to that performance page and add yourself there. It seems slightly cumbersome compared to bulk adding, but it’s worth doing as to not create duplicate information and to ensure all information stays connected. Plus, perhaps bulk adding will be an option in the future.
After that, you can add your headshot, videos, more performances, and even your Facebook or Twitter feed if you’re active on either platform. If you don’t know how to do any of these things, especially embedding videos, OpusAtlas offers step-by-step guides. All of this serves as a great precursor to a website.
However, if you do have a website, you can use one of my favorite features of OpusAtlas – the website widgets. Formatting performances onto a website can be time consuming and annoying; The same goes for creating subscriber lists. So OpusAtlas makes it possible to just use your account with them on your website. The widget option won’t appear until you’ve added at least one performance, but once you do, it’ll take you through the steps to customize the widgets as you like (including font, color, and position), giving you the code at the end. This should be straightforward to anyone who has worked on their own website, but even if you haven’t, it’s not too complicated to do. It mostly involves copying and pasting.
The one downside I see with the site at this time is the lack of university performances. For young artists, who may only have school performances on their resumes at first, this may seem off putting. It’s a fine line though – IMDB would not necessarily list student film performances for young actors or directors, so why should OpusAtlas do the same thing for musicians? For one thing, outside audiences may attend opera performances at universities, especially in areas that otherwise do not have opera. But still, artists certainly can add their school performances if they’d like to manually, so while this function is not currently there, it also should not deter younger singers.
OpusAtlas is young still, and a lot of its potential is based on user growth. Even in these stages though, its easy to use platform and multitude of features make it a worthwhile endeavor for anyone involved in opera at any level. Therefore, if young artists (like yourself) jump in now, you have the potential to be part of one of the best opera connections online.
Operaversity received compensation in exchange for writing this review. Although this post is sponsored, all opinions are my own.