CD Baby

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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 founder Derek Sivers. According to the company's web site, CD Baby was founded by Sivers in 1997, out of his home, and currently operates out of Portland, Oregon. [2]. CD Baby allows artists to set their price point for selling physical compact discs – CD Baby retains $4 of every sale, the remainder gets paid out to the artist on a weekly basis. They also charge a one-time $35 setup fee per CD. [3].

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[edit] CD Baby and musicians

Any artist may sell their music at CD Baby. CD Baby has no minimum sales requirement for members; an artist who sells only one CD every 20 years would still remain a part of the company's catalogue.

In 2004, CD Baby began offering a digital distribution service. By opting in to their digital distribution service, artists can authorize CD Baby to act on their behalf to submit music for digital sale to online retailers such as Apple's iTunes, Emusic, 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 are also several artists who have been signed by a major record label. These include 80's icon Tiffany, successful European artist Lory Bianco, Regina Spektor 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. American Idol winner Jordin Sparks' EP For Now was being sold at CD Baby. However, her page was removed after her appearance on Idol.

[edit] History

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 his own music. 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 every week
  • The musician will get the full name and address of everyone who purchases their music (unless they opt out)
  • The musician will never be removed from the system for not selling enough
  • The site will never accept advertising or paid-placement

In addition, Sivers made sure to listen to every CD he sold (currently several people are 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 founded by Paul Schatzkin, Tom Kimmel, and Michael Camp. Songs.com, though not having the nonexclusive policy CD Baby does, was also a website that sold primarily independent music. However, ten months after Songs.com was sold to Gaylord Entertainment for $3-million, Gaylord folded all its digital initiatives, including Songs.com. Schatzkin would then send an email to members of Songs.com, recommending CD Baby. Schatzkin was also the instigator of CD Baby's toll-free phone line, "1-800-BUY-MY-CD."

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 eighty or so employees of CD Baby whose work ranges from warehouse work to customer service to listening to CDs.

Approached by Apple iTunes to sell the CD Baby catalogue through the iTunes Music Store, Rhapsody, MusicMatch and Napster gave Sivers similar requests. Sivers decided to introduce digital distribution as an optional service for CD Baby's artists. [4]

Although the majority of artists who use CD Baby are North American, about thirty percent of orders for CD Baby are overseas.

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

[edit] Statistics

CD Baby statistics as of May 3, 2008:[1]

  • 229.751 artists sell their music at CD Baby
  • 4,296,408 CDs sold online to customers
  • $74,262,243 paid directly to the artists

[edit] Technical history

CD Baby runs on PHP and MySQL[1]. It gained brief notoriety when Sivers announced publicly in early 2005 that he was rewriting all the systems in Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL[2][3]. After about 2 years of work, he felt that the rewrite was still less than half done, and he threw the new code away and rewrote it again in his original programming language, PHP, and database, MySQL. He said it took him only two months to finish. This was a widely-discussed move, because some saw it as a demonstration that Ruby on Rails was overhyped and not up to the task of solving large problems. Sivers himself summed it up by saying that "Rails was an amazing teacher" but that PHP was perfectly up to the task once he had learned the lessons Ruby and Rails taught him.[4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b "CD Baby: about", May 3, 2008
  2. ^ "CD Baby rewrite in Postgres and Ruby, Baby!", January 22, 2005
  3. ^ "Migrating to Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL: An Interview with CD Baby", November 2, 2005
  4. ^ "7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails", September 22, 2007

[edit] External links

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