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/

New Music for You, and You and You!

Peter's evangelical passion for genitals (see Evangenitals post below) rather prodded me in the direction of CD Baby I was curious to see why he was suggesting we purchase his genital passions on this particular website. I really should have gone to bed, but found myself playing with their Discover Music button. It's simple, you just type in the name of an artist you like, and they suggest other people you might like. The beauty of it is that it is a website of independent music, so you haven't heard of half the names suggested to you. This makes is so much more interesting than Amazon suggesting artists that, while you might initially have a passing interest, chances are you won't ever need to buy the album as you are destined to hear it in lifts and supermarkets for the next year or so. You won't hear many of CD Baby's suggestions as 'boarding music' when you next get on a plane.

For those of you bored with the 20,000,000 songs on your 346GB mp3 player, and uninspired by forthcoming albums by major names, this is the place for you.

Thankfully, the kind people at CD Baby have put samples of the cd's on the page, so your search results provide you with some brief entertainment, whether or not you decide to buy. I decided to put it through its paces.

Give me music like Nina Simone - suggested Liza Melfi, Bjorn Norestig, Lisa Sokolov.

Give me music like Pearl Jam - suggested NYC Smoke, Lucas, Caroline's Spine

Give me music like Half Man Half Biscuit - suggsted Dogs Must be Carried, MJ Hibbett & The Validators

Give music like Britney Spears - suggested children's music, fair enough I thought, it works.

Not only can you search by the artist name, you can also search with a key word.

My search for 'annoying' music gave me an album by Becky, about who the blurb read

'Music to annoy your parents with', which I thought was surely proof of an excellent website.