Happy Birthday CD Baby!
CD Baby, the independent musician's online music retail darling turns 10 years old this week, and creator/owner Derek Severs sent out an announcement email this morning to share his excitement, and to tease their upcoming "new ideas." I remember when CD Baby launched in 1998. I was sitting at my desk at a small startup web development firm outside of Seattle called Synchronicity, Inc., (which, while no longer with us was still building sites a full year after the dot.bomb), and I was actively NOT working on my music at the time, and thought, "this is a great idea, why even try to bother local record stores into carrying my music, I could put it online on this little website and circumvent the whole issue."
It seemed revolutionary at the time, and it was. I've been selling the Last Fair Deal CD my band and I made in 2005 on CD Baby, and while no one at the bank is complaining that our account is getting "too full," we have had a slow steady stream of sales over the years. More than on iTunes Music Store. The most important point to me is that over these past several years, Severs has been continually trying new things, and making new offerings (such as plug-ins for one's MySpace page, digital downloads, hell, getting LFD's "True Tales" on iTunes store in the first place was because of CD Baby). My feeling is that Derek Severs and CD Baby are one of the truly innovative web enterprises that has ever come along, and their commitment to helping independent artists get their material out to the world and make some money doing it, is unprecedented, unsurpassed, and perhaps even underestimated.
With new, ongoing ventures like HostBaby, Derek and Co. are continuing to break new ground and now have a website-building/hosting offering for musician's for $20 a month for everything.
I want to publicly applaud Derek's efforts over the years, his ongoing commitment to independent artists, and his continuing desire to bring more to the table. Happy Birthday, congratulations, and here's to many more years to come, during which time we may see the cascading effects of the sea-change in the industry come home to roost when CD Baby and it's subsidiaries are seen as the natural choice for artists who wish to stay out of bed with traditional distribution of their work. The more people start turning away from the old channels, (artists and fans) and start looking for alternatives, that's when Severs' endeavors may be leaned on by creatives in record numbers because they have already been doing this for 10 years, and they have it down. I have always felt that they have the absolute easiest sign-up and ongoing maintenance of one's offerings than any other website across the board that requires sign up and arrangement of any kind by regular people who don't want to know about the deep inner workings of global distribution models, but want to focus on their art, and hand it off to someone who has already mastered the process. CD Baby is where it's at. In the past year they have totally rebuilt their web infrastructure from the ground up with a much faster modern website, with all the present-day expected snappiness and ease of use you could want.
Read Derek's birthday missive pasted below.
Hi,
I started CD Baby 10 years ago this week - in March 1998.
You probably know that I'm just a musician-geek, not a business-man. Never meant to start a company. I was just selling my own CD, then helped some friends do it, then it accidently turned into CD Baby. (Ooops!)
Now CD Baby has paid over $70 million dollars(!!) directly to musicians. And despite the moaning you hear from the majors, independent artists are selling better than ever. Even physical CD sales are up 30% over last year!
ANNOUNCEMENT:
Friends will tell you that for the past 10 years I've spent most waking hours, 7 days a week, doing nothing but CD Baby. Last year I just slept on the couch at the office for 6 months, usually working from 7am to midnight.
So today seems like a good day to tell you that I don't work at CD Baby anymore, and haven't in months.
I'm still the owner, but haven't been to the office since May. The crew there is running things better than I ever could. They know more than I do, and do a better job.
I've made that transition from self-employed to business-owner. (You know you're a true business-owner when you can leave your business for a year, and come back to find it's doing much better than when you left.)
WHY AM I TELLING YOU THIS?
Because the reason I freed-up my time is to find more ways to help you.
Helping you develop, create, promote, and sell your music makes me happier than anything. It's still why I bounce out of bed in the morning.
I love it even more than making my own music. (Weird, huh?) By helping you get your music out to the world, and helping you make a living doing it, I feel that in a way I'm making more music than ever.
There are many ways I can help, but I'll email you about those next week.
Today was just a CD Baby birthday announcement. Still, I wanted to let you know there are exciting things to come.
--
Derek Sivers, founder, CD Baby, HostBaby
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