CD Baby

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
This article or section reads like an advertisement.
Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view per Wikipedia policy. Mark blatant advertising for speedy deletion with {{db-spam}}. (help, talk)
This does not cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) This article has been tagged since June 2006.

CD Baby is an online music store specializing in the sale of physical compact discs from independent musicians directly to consumers. Additionally, the company has become a digital aggregator of independent music recordings, distributing content to several online digital music retailers.

CD Baby is the d/b/a of Hit Media, Inc., a Nevada Corporation [1] owned by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers. According to the company's web site, CD Baby was founded by Sivers in 1998, out of his home. [2]

According to their website, CD Baby allows content owners to set their price point for selling physical compact discs. CD Baby retains $4 of every sale, the remainder gets paid out to the content owner on a weekly basis. They also charge a one-time $35 setup fee per CD. [3]

According to their website, CD Baby is operated in Portland, Oregon, USA and was founded by musician Derek Sivers in 1997. [4]

Contents

[edit] CD Baby and musicians

Any content owner may sell their music at CD Baby. CD Baby has no minimum sales requirement for its members; an artist who sells only one CD per year would still remain a part of the company's catalogue.

In 2004, CD Baby began offering a digital distribution service to its members. By opting in to their digital distribution service, content owners can authorize CD Baby to act on their behalf to submit music for digital sale to online retailers such as Apple's iTunes, Real Network's Rhapsody, Napster, MusicNet, among others.

[edit] Successful artists at CD Baby

In addition to the many unknown independent artists in the CD Baby catalog, there arealso several more well known artists in the their catalog who were formerly signed by a major record label. These include 80's icon Tiffany, successful European artist Lory Bianco, and Jack Johnson who sold his music at CD Baby prior to signing with a major record label. The catalog also includes an album with early demo songs by Madonna which is being sold by her former producer Stephen Bray. Also, Gary Jules released his debut album on CD Baby before it was released by a major label; it contains the hit song Mad World.

[edit] Origins to present

CD Baby began with its founder and president, Derek Sivers in Woodstock, New York. Sivers was a full-time musician who created the website to sell a CD he'd made online. As a hobby, he also began to sell the CDs of local bands and friends. Because he was already making a living as a musician, he was able to be flexible with making CD Baby the "utopian" online store for independent musicians. To do this, Sivers followed four main principles based on his personal preferences:

  • The musician will be paid weekly for their CD sales
  • The musician will have the full name and address of everyone who purchases their CD
  • The musician will always be allowed to sell their CD, regardless of how many copies they sell
  • The musician will not have to worry about advertising or product placement hurting sales

In addition, Sivers made sure to listen to every CD he sold (currently someone is employed to do this). The operation was run mainly in Sivers' bedroom.

Sivers eventually hired John Steup as his Vice President and first employee. In an interview, Sivers recalls saying to Steup: "This thing might get huge one day. I mean, we might have 100 artists here."

Steadily, CD Baby grew as more artists wanted to sell their music through the website. Sivers always dealt with the artists directly.

CD Baby was somewhat inspired by a website called Songs.com run by Paul Schatzkin. Songs.com, though not having the nonexclusive policy CD Baby does, was also a website that sold primarily independent music. However, six months after Songs.com was sold to Gaylord Entertainment for $1.2 million, the website became defunct. Schatzkin would then send an email to members of Songs.com, recommending CD Baby.

Sivers never accepts money to advertise a CD more than any other CD and doesn't negotiate with investors or display advertisements. Currently, there are sixty or so employees of CD Baby whose work ranges from warehouse work to customer service to listening to CDs.

Though Sivers is not interested in selling digital music by creating a website such as MP3.com or eMusic, he has been approached by Apple iTunes to put the CD Baby catalogue on the iTunes Music Store as a digital medium. Rhapsody, MusicMatch and Napster gave Sivers similar requests. Sivers decided to introduce digital downloading as an optional service for CD Baby's artists. [5]

Although the majority of artists who use CD Baby are North American, about thirty percent of orders for CD Baby are overseas. For this reason, Sivers aims to create CD Baby warehouses in Japan, Europe and Canada.

In 2003, Sivers won a World Technology Award for Entertainment.

[edit] Statistics

CD Baby statistics as of October 26, 2005:

  • 153,818 artists sell their CD at CD Baby.
  • 2,747,171 CDs sold online to customers.
  • $34,471,383.42 paid to artists. [6]

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../c/d/_/CD_Baby_e93e.html"