A nice vision, for sure, but reality is a little more complicated, says Derek Sivers, who revolutionized the indie-music business when he founded CD Baby (cdbaby.com) in 1997. In 2008 Sivers sold the company, which to date has paid $111 million to musicians for sales of physical CDs and downloads, and his entrepreneurial instincts are stirring again. Sivers’s main project these days is launching MuckWork, an online system for musicians to outsource “uncreative dirty work” such as trademarking band names, copyrighting songs, coding websites, and updating e-mail lists.
To get Sivers’s advice for musicians on how to approach this transitional moment in the record business, I caught up with him at his new home in New York City.
In the past, having a real manufactured CD was essential to being perceived as a professional musician. Is that no longer the case now that there are so many more options for getting music out there?
SIVERS Well, not yet. It’s still a kind of subliminal impression. You know you could go to a hotel and it could seem pretty nice, but then you go into the bathroom and it seems really cheap—there’s something plasticky about it. Somebody could probably make the argument that, well, plastic works just as well as marble for countertops . . . but it still gives that impression of professional vs. cheap. The CD is the thing that separates a celebrity from a kid in the basement.
But the more important [consideration] is just the practicality. We are still in hybrid times. There might be people under the age of 30 or even under 40 who have been living online for 15 years, who feel like their computer is an extension of their arm, and they are completely happy doing everything digitally and never want another round piece of plastic in their apartment again. And great—for those people you need to make sure that your music is available for download. But then there are people who just prefer to have the CD and will argue about all their reasons why.
The question I ask musicians who are thinking of skipping the CD entirely is, are you really at a point in your career where you are ready to alienate a percentage of your potential audience? If you are, congratulations. But if you’re not there yet, you should have both available.
Do you imagine that in another three or five years we will no longer be in that hybrid time?
SIVERS Yeah. I think once it’s more like a 90/10 split, it’ll be like the decision to not do vinyl right now—where it’s like, you know what, 1 percent of the people out there wish we had vinyl but we don’t, so oh well. I think people will know when the CD has hit that point.
For example, I was surprised when I interviewed Amber Rubarth. She’s been a full-time musician for four or five years now, doing quite well completely indie. She said the only reason she’s able to make a full-time living as a musician right now is because of selling CDs off the stage. The gigs pay something, but she’ll get paid $200 for the gig and then she’ll sell $400 in CDs. So I think the CD is still big, especially for anybody who plays live. It becomes a souvenir of the moment.
A lot of musicians these days think that networking online is going to break their music, yet real-world gigs and interactions with people haven’t become obsolete. In some ways maybe they’ve become more important.
SIVERS I’d say more important. The more valuable thing is always going to be the more scarce thing. So when everybody’s lives are led online, then having a great live performance is going to help you stand out from the pack so much more than being one of the one million musicians with a great Web presence a click away.
I think about that stuff a lot: What is the road less traveled? What is the thing that most people are doing, and therefore what is the thing that few people are doing? Whatever few people are doing is where the greater value lies. If a whole new generation of musicians is spending much more time clicking around MySpace to add new friends than they are practicing their scales and arpeggios, then if you are one of the few who puts in an hour or two a night to practice your scales and arpeggios and chord voicings or whatever, it’s going to make you that much more of a standout.
I guess it comes back to the decision to make a physical CD. Right now a lot of musicians are choosing not to. To me that gives you even more reason why you should—it sets you apart from the pack. Other musicians have abandoned it, but we’ve proven that there are still people who want it. And in the big picture, what does it really cost—900 bucks to manufacture a thousand CDs, or something like that? If you’re planning on doing even a few decent gigs, you should be able to make that money back.
The larger industry is moving toward the strategy of giving away recordings to get people to concerts. I can see the logic of that if you are, say, Prince, but does it apply to musicians at the grassroots level?
SIVERS Well, in a way it applies more. You still want to make it as easy as possible for one person to tell another, “Oh my god, this song is great—you have to hear it.”
I do know some musicians who are overly concerned about piracy. I think until you reach a certain point, you want people to be able to freely and easily copy your music—send a copy to a friend, send a link, here it is, free, tell everybody. The idea is using a song like a movie trailer. The movie trailer is always free. Think of your music like that, and make it easy for people to spread, instead of being paranoid and locking it down.
CD Baby recently started selling individual song downloads for the first time. Is that a recognition of the shift that’s going on?
SIVERS This is one [subject] where I’m just opinionated, and this is my personal take. The reason I never pushed to do single-song downloads with CD Baby is that I think that’s more for the Beyoncé-type artists who have only one song that everybody is interested in. They don’t care about the other 12; they just want that one song.
But my hunch from doing this for 15 years is that at that truly independent, emerging artist level, people aren’t with an artist because of one song. It’s usually because they’re interested in that artist as a whole. They’ve seen them play or they’ve heard they’re good. There is no hit single. I thought that it was a huge benefit that there were no single-song downloads on CD Baby before. We had almost no complaints in the year or so that I was there while we were selling full album downloads. Musicians were generally thrilled, saying they were making a lot more money through CD Baby downloads than they were through any other source but iTunes.
So I’m not a big fan of single-song sales for the independent artist. I can see how in the long term a musician might go the way of releasing a song at a time; I can see that as a different way of having a career. But most artists are still bundling their music at an EP or LP length, and I think it’s important to emphasize the sale of the bundle just for financial reasons. Plus, if somebody only came for that one song, you just made a dead-end road for them. There are no more forks or branches in the road that will turn them into a deeper fan.
