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How CD Baby Changed Everything

Yesterday, Derek Sivers released a new book. It got me thinking about the number of things that have changed for independent musicians since he started CD Baby in 1998.

So I went back to the archive.

In 1998, I had a mailing list for indie musicians called IndieBiz. On May 6, Rik Wright of HipSync Records asked this question...

Does anyone know of a company that JUST processes and ships orders from Web commerce? What I want to do is have my Record Company's site have a consistent look and feel, yet, when a viewer wants to purchase - have our "shopping cart" reside on someone else's server (with our look and feel or a non-proprietary one) and have them process and ship the product. My thought is that the arrangement would be similar to a distribution deal where we pay them a percentage per sale. Does anyone know of a company that might do something like this?

Later that day, Derek Sivers responded...

Hey Rik -

I think I can help you with this:

I setup my online record store, "CD Baby", to be able to do that for you. Your customers don't need to come in my "front door" and search for your record. You can put a "Buy CD" or "Buy Tape" button on your site and it will jump right to YOUR OWN ordering page on CD Baby. (nobody else's records there. no ads. no distractions. just collecting your customer's info so we can charge their card & send your CD to them within 48 hours.)

As far as the LOOK, I usually add bands to CD Baby for NO setup charge and it's good look. (check out a sample page at: http://www.cdbaby.com/buy/arlen.htm)

But if you want to stay consistent with the look of your website, I can grab your HTML and imitate it for a $20 setup fee. That way your customers won't really notice they've left your website.

Lemme know whatcha think.

And here is something from the same mailing list on June 12, 1998, where Derek responded to a thread about a contest people were entering just to get their music on the web...

Okay - I guess I would be a fool if I didn't toss in one little plug for CD Baby here.

Since some people seem to like the idea of Billboard Talent Net just to "be on the web" - I should let you know that my record store called CD Baby will not only set you up for FREE including digitizing two of your sound files in RealAudio, but we sell & ship your CDs for you, too. We just take a $4 cut per CD on the back-end. Nothing up front.

Obviously, you don't need your CDs in a store unless people are buying them, but if they ARE...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\
-
CD BABY:
* no charge to put your CDs in our store
* we make you your own unique web page with all the links, reviews & bio info you want.
* you can link your fans directly to YOUR record, so they don't have to come through our front door & search for you.
* we don't categorize music into stupid "pop, r&b, alternative" categories - you are free to describe your music as you like
* we digitize & host two songs in RealAudio for FREE. We'd be glad to do as many as you'd like for only $10/song more.
* no advertisements(!) = no distractions for your fan who's about to buy.
* your fans can buy securely with Visa/Mastercard or AmEx, OR call our 1-800-# to order if they'd rather.
* we ship your CDs from here (New York) within 48 hours. great postage rates.
* and lastly: when you send us your records to be sold in CD Baby, we send you the famous "CD Baby carepak" with 100 full color postcards telling your fans where they can buy your CD, free music biz newsletters, coupons, and more...

ALL the info and details are on our site: http://www.cdbaby.com/home.htm
Email me with any questions or call me at 1-800-448-6369.

- Derek Sivers, president
- CD Baby & Hit Media Inc.
- http://www.cdbaby.com/

Glad things have changed! :)

11 Big Ideas by Derek Sivers of CD Baby

As I mentioned earlier this month, Derek Sivers has a new book on business called Anything You Want. I highly recommend it for any musician or entrepreneur.

Here are some of the big ideas it contains...

1. Business is not about money. It's about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.


2. Making a company is a great way to improve the world while improving yourself.


3. When you make a company, you make a utopia. It's where you design your perfect world.


4. Never do anything just for the money.


5. Don't pursue business just for your own gain. Only answer the calls for help.


6. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what's not working.


7. Your business plan is moot. You don't know what people really want until you start doing it.


8. Starting with no money is an advantage. You don't need money to start helping people.


9. You can't please everyone, so proudly exclude people.


10. Make yourself unncessary to the running of your business.


11. The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy.

And here is one of the stories in audio/video form...

Sound good? Get the book now!

Top 10 Songwriting Clichés

Have you ever listened to a song, only to wonder where you heard the lyrics from before? You scroll through your lyrical library, wondering if this is a cover song and come across the old familiar friend—the cliché. Unfortunately scores of hit songs are chock full of clichés, but you’re a better song writer than that, right?

1. The Drunk and Depressing Country Song

It’s a common joke that country songs are all basically about some guy drinking away his sorrows because his wife left him for another man, his dog got ran over and his tractor broke down. Country songs have become bar anthems, and while this can be a good thing commercially, there tends to be a lot lacking in the actual lyrics of the song. Avoid phrases about how much whiskey you drank last night, or anything that contains “broken heart”. It’s been said and done.

2. Self Explanatory Rock Songs

We all love to rock out, but when you’re in a rock band or writing rock lyrics about rock, could you avoid using the word “rock”. Between phrases like “gonna rock you”, “like a rock”, “keep on rockin’” or “rock this/that—enter noun” we finally get the point. You’re having a good time! It’s time to come up with something a little more sophisticated, and original.

3. Profanity Taking the Place of Real Words

Yeah, your bling is shiny and you talk tough—but let’s get out of this groove of lazy rhyming. In hip hop or rap using favorite four letter words followed by “this” or “you” only portrays your lack of vocabulary skills. There are over 170,000 words in the dictionary, so make use of them!

4. All About California

It’s the sunshine state, and a pretty nice place, so why do songwriters feel the need to whine about it so much. There are more songs about California than any other U.S. state. Once you’ve heard the theme song for The OC television drama you’ll understand. It’s probably because so many bands call California home, but how about using metaphors or just leaving it out altogether. Try writing a song about Vermont or New Mexico. They’re pretty nice places too.

5. Love Songs

There are a lot of great, touching love songs out there but there are a lot of terrible ones too. Avoid the typical “missing you”, “I still love you”, “I’ll always love you” cliché. It’s a nice word to hear but once overused it loses its meaning and let’s face it—love is an ever changing thing. The 80’s was all about sappy love songs dripping with cheese, and maybe they should be left there. Top 40 music is unfortunately by far the worst offender of this.

6. We Know You’re Emotionally Disturbed

Great songwriters are not usually born from a free, great upbringing. A lot of what great songwriting is, is opening doors for emotional connection with your audience. But many take it a step too far. As if the world wasn’t already depressing enough at times, we find the need to write songs about how depressing we are. Nirvana arguably did it best, but it seems to have mutated into something else—Emo perhaps. Please, no more songs about how you hate yourself, or how bad you’ve got it. We’re all in the same boat so deal with it or find another way to write about it.

7. Booty

Booty is a good thing, but it’s time we come up with a new word for it. Songs about shaking your booty, or about how great your booty is have become old news. Go for timeless if you want to be a great songwriter. We encourage you to shake what your mama gave you—how about that for cliché—but walk the walk instead of talking the talk.

8. How Rich and Famous You Are

Most of America, most of the world in fact, is not rich and famous and writing countless songs about this is not only a cliché, but completely self obsessed. Songs are meant to connect with an audience, your fans. Frankly, writing about the amount of cars you own, how big your house is, or how much gold is in your grille is not only uninteresting, but overdone. How about songs about how much you’d like to give the rest of us a taste of that solid gold?

9. Punk Covers of Pop Songs

While it can be funny, don’t expect to make a  good hit reworking a pop song for punk music. We’ve heard enough Sweet Carolines, thank you very much. This almost doesn’t fall under the category of songwriting, except that it’s so annoying it must be entered somewhere.  We get it, you’re being ironic. Don’t rewrite lyrics from a pop song into a punk song, they mix like oil and water.

10. Overused Rhymes

Understandably it can be hard to come up with rhymes on the fly, but a little effort will go a long way for songwriters. Avoid all those overused, easy rhymes like the dance, chance, romance trio. Miss you and kiss you also fall into this cliché trap.

Hopefully you’ve spotted the clichés used to describe clichés in this article. Songwriting should be original, straight from the heart, and hard hitting. Use the aforementioned rules to avoid clichés in your songwriting and original, great material will be the result.

Add clichés below... 

Are Good Musicians Born or Made?

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. 

Dan McLaughlin is testing this on himself, with 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice," in hopes of going from a newbie golfer to playing on the PGA Tour.

Dan, who is currently at about 1600 hours, started with very minimal golf experience. In fact, he had never played a full 18 holes of golf and had only been to a driving range a couple of times. He's an average guy by most standards; a 30-year-old commercial photographer with no previous experience as a competitive athlete and not in particularly good physical condition, with slightly under-average height and weight.

Visit TheDanPlan.com for more information and updates...

To break this down what he's doing for you, his schedule is six hours of practice, six days per week, for about six years.

Would a newbie musician trying this get good results? Or is musical talent something we're born with?

Post thoughts below...

How Do You Know When It's Done?

Seth Godin answered the question "How Do You Know When It's Done?" on his blog this morning. And his answer is...

Of course, it's not done. It's never done.

That's not the right question.

The question is: when is it good enough?

Good enough, for those that seek perfection, is what we call it when it's sufficient to surpass the standards we've set. Anything beyond good enough is called stalling and a waste of time.

If you don't like your definition of 'good enough', then feel free to change that, but the goal before shipping is merely that. Not perfect.

Good advice for musicians, I think.

Here's a story that's a great example of this...

Top band is recording a song in the studio. Label is on deadline and the pressure is high. Producer is stalling, trying to tweak it. But it's done...at least in the opinion of the label people.

So a label guy comes into the studio, gets a copy of the "rough" track, and it gets released.

Song goes to #1 and was one of the act's biggest hits.

Agree with Seth that it's never done, but sometimes it is finished.

Rebecca Black Pulls "Friday" from YouTube

Rebecca Black is pissed at Ark Music Factory, the company which wrote and produced her "Friday" song aa well as the video. She is claiming that Ark is exploiting her image as well as the song, neither of which she says they have rights to.

The problem is that the song was written by Patrice Wilson of Ark, the recording was produced by Ark, and the video was produced by Ark.

But I'm sure Rebecca Black (or her parents) paid a ton for these services...

Will be interesting to see how this one works out. Until then, make sure you get your agreements in writing, so everything about ownership of your music, production, and image is crystal clear!

UPDATE: Rebecca Black has re-released the video as a "Director's Cut."

UPDATE 2: The new version has been pulled. How am I going to celebrate the upcoming weekend now?

Does Twitter Matter? It Depends...

Some people are making really good use of Twitter, using it to spread their message, engage their followers, start conversations, and keep in touch...

Others, not so much...

Regardless, there is always room for improvement!

Where do you stack up? Klout is a service that looks at more than just the number of people following you, but also how often you get response, retweets, and other "connection" with them. It looks at the type of messages you send, analyzing each, to see how you use Twitter and what you talk about.

Worth looking at. Go here to sign up.

The Death of College Radio

The following comments from the newsletter of DJ Ron, which talks about Vanderbilt University's radio station, WRVU, pretty much sums up what is happening (or had happened) to college radio stations across the country...

On Tuesday afternoon around 2:30pm, WRVU 91.1 FM went off the air.  An agreement was made by the Vanderbilt Student Communications board to sell the broadcasting frequency to WPLN.  WRVU will be off the air for the summer and will return next fall as an online stream and a WPLN HD channel.   There are so many things that are wrong with this based on my perception.

WRVU was Vanderbilt's only media outlet that reached out to the Nashville community.  One of the statements that VSC board say is that students don't listen to FM radio.  That might be the case, but Nashvillians do.  WRVU offers a wide range of music and cultural programming that no other station does.   A lot of people grew up listening to WRVU and have a strong personal connection to it and the university because of it.

HD and online radio is not the same as FM and to say that is the same is both classist and elitist.  Who actually has an HD radio?  Online radio requires an internet connection on a computer or an advanced smart phone.  This kind of radio should be free and available to all regardless of financial means.  Making this content exclusive / unavailable to a lot of people is against the DNA of community radio. 

People at WRVU had no say or representation in the decision making process.  The Vanderbilt Student Communications board is made up of faculty and a few students at large.  When I was at Vanderbilt the VSC board actually represented its members - with people from each division helping make the decisions.  How can a board which doesn't include input from its members effectively govern it?

Every step of the way, this was handled by VSC board in a seemingly underhanded way.  When the exploration of a broadcast sale was announced to us in September, I tried to register SAVEWRVU that night.  Mysteriously, the three domains .org/.com/.net were bought more than a week before and were pointing to the insidevandy.com page (which had a seemingly biased article in place). The mysterious owner of the SaveWRVU domains agreed to point the sites to savewrvuradio, but I am wondering how much longer this will last.  DJs and students were under the impression from the VSC board that changes would not be made during the summer / when the students were out.  We didn't receive any notice and even the website  wrvu.org disappeared on Wednesday.

As a Vanderbilt alumnus and someone who has had the honor and privilege of broadcasting on WRVU for nearly 20 years, I am personally appalled on how all this was handled.   It makes me feel very upset at the both VSC board and Vanderbilt University for allowing this to happen.  

Personally, I have been an emotional basket case most of this week. WRVU-FM has been a major part of my life for all these years.  It is what kept me at Vanderbilt after my disastrous freshman year.  Doing the LGBT show gave me confidence and freedom.  Spinning the dance show allowed me to develop my skills as a DJ.  Without WRVU, I wouldn't be doing  who I am today.   

Technology is changing and college students are often the first to jump on things like listening to radio programming via mobile phones or computers, but I think he brings up a good point that, for a lot of people, broadcast radio is extremely important as it's a cheap and easy way to get information. You can get a radio for $5 and it works without a subscription or any kind of special software. Computers aren't there yet.

And then there is the "public interest" argument... Many commercial stations today have no "local" programming, having replaced it with syndicated content from who knows where. And what commercial station is going to run something controversial like gay/lesbian programming?

As far a music goes, local/regional acts don't stand a chance on most radio stations these days, with many music programming decisions being made hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away, by people who know nothing about the communities their stations serve, beyond how many people in those communities that Arbitron says are listening.

College radio is a vital part of the community. Not only because of local programming, but because it's a great launching pad for both new broadcast talent and musicians.

For example...

I started in radio in 1991, when I was a Freshman in college, doing production work for WSMS (University of Memphis). After graduation, I worked at WUMS (University of Mississippi), where I hosted a weekly show featuring music and interviews from independent acts from around the country. When I started my radio promotion company in 1995, college radio was the vehicle that helps us get bands exposure.

Like Ron mentioned above, without college radio, I probably wouldn't be doing what I am today.

Would you?

Something to think about... If you have a situation similar to the one going on with WRVU, I hope you'll consider these things before making a decision.

And I'll hope you'll add your "college radio stories" below, to show others reading this how important this medium is for the community...

Here is My Bank Account Number...

Got this in my email box last week...

"Hi david hooper thanks alot now iam giving you authority to do everything but asist me with some money(2000$ dollas)so that i produce videoz&send every thing at once,but before you send i request you kindly to tell me theday,where to get the money from,after that i send mo new music thanks, your good man lets go ahead me&you have agood night."

Not sure where this guy is from, but as I was trying to be courteous to different cultures and how they do things, I originally decided not to post the message in the Funny Musician Emails section. 

Then I got another email from him.

And another.

And about 10 more after that...

So I changed my mind.

Messages like this...

"Hi david hooper how you today? after one week iam going to give you my acount(in barclays bank and my ID number (removed) phone number (phone number in Uganda) thank you."

And this...

"Hi david hooper i made mistake the phone number is (another phone number in Uganda) but it is not available at this time ID number is correct,acount number i will give it to you next week but it is in(BARCLAYS BANK) more to that i have another adress (another email address) have agood night."

Whether the messages are legitimate or not, I have no idea. For the point of this post, it doesn't matter.

And the point of this post is...

You will have a better response to your "pitch" if, before you approach somebody, you find out how the person communicates, how he does business, and how he's done deals in the past.

It works for everything...

Want a date with a certain woman? Find out what she likes and hand it to her on a silver platter.

Want to sell more Mary Kay cosmetics? Show up wearing a pink suit.

Want to get your song cut by ___________? Listen to previous songs cut by ___________ and pitch something similar, but different.

Good luck with your pitch!

Making Gigs Special

Always on the lookout for interesting ways bring people out to shows and just found this from NYC-based artist Jennings, which I think is worth posting here as an example of turning "just another gig" into something special for fans...