Audio Refugees

Any of you that have stuff up on CDBaby are probabaly already painfully aware of this. Those that don't might find this interesting, in a morbid fascination / fatal traffic accident kind of way...

Long story short, Derek Sivers left CDBaby a couple years ago. He contemplated just pulling the plug on the whole thing, but decided instead to sell it DiscMakers, well known CD manufacturing company that started near Seattle several years ago. I think they paid $2.5 mill for it.

Of course many of us musicians were concerned about this corporate take-over and the implications it might have on the future of CDBaby. But up until recently it was pretty much business as usual, with promises of a long-overdue website redesign and more cool features, now that there are more resources available.

Several months ago they started sending out email notifications that they would be rolling out a complete website overhaul in mid-July, and did a lot of touting about new features such as being able to sell individual track directly from the site, and artists being able upload tracks instead of having to send physical CDs.

Well the rollout happened, and it might qualify as the biggest disaster in the history of online retailing. Pretty much nothing worked as it was supposed to, from the customer front-end to the client backend. One of the biggest problems was that they completely screwed up the whole Accounting section, bad data was everywhere, and even with good data the new UI is basically unusable. Another big problem is that many artists saw drastic drops in income over the past two months, for some it stopped completely.

Things are slowly getting back to a usable state, but the outrage from clients over the past two months has been incredible. Many people wanted them to roll everything back to the way it was before. But in reading the BBS threads, I found out that they migrated from CDBabay's old Linux-based system to DiscMakers Windows-based system, and anyone who knows anything about IT can imagine what a nightmare that kind of migration can be, and how a rollback after more than a month of using the new system is basically impossible.

A lot of this, including the high levels of hatred for the new owner, remind me of the days of the iLike takeover of GB (ah, the good ol' days).

Anyway, here are the BBS threads for your amusement if you're interested. Just click on any one of the most recent 6-7 threads (most recent is at the top) crack open a cool one, spark something up, and enjoy

http://www.cdbaby.org

a real pity stevo. I know how fond you are of derick and the baby .... and tho I've questioned some of his practices in the past, I've never had a problem with how he gave his left nut for indies. took a few and did a bit too much dream-mongering (and got quite wealthy in the process) but hey, he did more good than bad ... and to see the site and the system destroyed is not what anybody would want.

I hope the owners and staff can bring it back to pre-migration status somehow.

Just curious - are there any folks here besides me that have music up on CD Baby?

I have my CD on there. I think I've sold one single or something...

mistertroll wrote:I have my CD on there. I think I've sold one single or something...

Ah, thanks Troll.

I was looking for people I could comiserate with about it's serious downfall since the July "relaunch". Everyones hits, sales, and streams have fallen precipitously, and it doesn't look like it will ever return to its former glory. It's so very sad.

For me the coolest thing about them was the ability to get sales from their loyal customers who just browse the catalog and buy stuff from artists they've never heard of before. But now they f'd up the front-end so bad (search, navigation, UI, etc.) that all of those "cold" sales have completely dried up for everyone. I could go on bitching about the 100 or so other things they f'd up, but if no one here has any vested interest in CD Baby, then they probably don't have any interest in hearing my futile rants.

I sure wish cj & krispy had been raking in dough from CD Baby, 'cause that company needs to be taken to task in a way that they have a real knack for

Same goes for the massive global fraud that is NumberOneMusic.com. I wish I could get a posse here to go after those guys and make their lives a living hell.

Did I ever mention I got to meet Derek Sivers? He's been someone I've paid attention to for quite a while. He came to Vancouver to visit because he was interested in trying out new cities to live in. (he settled on New York.) He actually came to my kid's baseball game to meet me.

In his blog, there are pretty much daily comments about how CD baby just isn't nearly the company it used to be since he sold it. He rarely has advice for people who wish the company has kept up the high standards.

It must be strange to build something so great, and then sell it and walk away. I asked him what other goals he wanted to achieve, and he said he didn't really have any right then. So I told him he should become a parent, it's the last frontier for a self-made man.

We talked about Taxi for a while too, that was pretty illuminating. He likes the company, not the boss' opinion of musicians so much.

I also asked him if he ever feels like playing music in front of a crowd. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, "No, that part of my life is completed."

Stevo wrote:I sure wish cj & krispy had been raking in dough from CD Baby, 'cause that company needs to be taken to task in a way that they have a real knack for

Sorry Stevo, I went off the idea of selling music a few years ago.
You could tell me more about NumberOneMusic though.

I've never once purchased a single thing through CDBaby. I have, however, had several clients who have sold several hundred units each directly from their CDBaby page, and many hundreds more via the digital dl connections est through CDBaby.

Chris K. wrote:I've never once purchased a single thing through CDBaby. I have, however, had several clients who have sold several hundred units each directly from their CDBaby page, and many hundreds more via the digital dl connections est through CDBaby.

point was, I believe, that was then. this is now.

cjdenecia wrote:

Chris K. wrote:I've never once purchased a single thing through CDBaby. I have, however, had several clients who have sold several hundred units each directly from their CDBaby page, and many hundreds more via the digital dl connections est through CDBaby.

point was, I believe, that was then. this is now.

I'll check around and see if anyone I know is selling anything from there.