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
