Derek Sivers

You probably won’t have heard of Derek Sivers. He was a pretty successful music retailer. In a world of music retail where we could have been selling shoes, Derek Sivers definitely didn’t sell shoes. I like Derek Sivers.

In 1997 to sell his own music Sivers set up a site called CD Baby, it did the job and other artists though hey I wonder if you could sell my CD’s. With this Sivers instilled some rules, and ethos,

• 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

Fair enough, and you know CD Baby flourished, I myself have bought CD’s from them and their rates, for artists mean that the artist isn’t being gouged. I like CD Baby, I liked them a lot for their confirmation emails, here is one...


“Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, October 19th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...”

Then 2008 Derek Sivers thought time to give it all up. He put CD Baby into a charitable trust and then when it was sold that the trust got a pretty hefty wedge. Derek Sivers the intelligent man that he is, if he had sold it and contributed that money to that charitable trust then of course the IRS would have took a pretty fair old percentage of that. Giving to the charity first made for sound charity sense. Derek explains it all here http://sivers.org/trust

Derek’s site has his blog, articles and resources for musicians, he lives life comfortably but not extravagantly. His site is definitely worth a visit. http://sivers.org/