CD Baby

CD Baby is an American online retailer of music CDs by independent musicians without recording contracts. Although the main basis of the distribution of CDs is also DRM-free music tracks in MP3 format are sold.

Company principles

Musician

CD Baby sells CDs any artist, the CDs are not selected yet rated and not censored. There is no minimum sales volume, and only a CD sold per year does not lead to exclusion.

The artists receive weekly paid the revenue generated.

CD Baby explicitly not confined to American artists, but the proportion of foreign, especially non- English-speaking musicians is still very low.

Sales commissions

CD Baby reserves a $ 4 per CD sold, as well as 35 U.S. dollars required as a one-time setup fee. The pricing is done in consultation with the artists, most of the CD price is around U.S. $ 1 per song.

CD pages

CD Baby is aimed for each CD a Web page that contains no external advertisements, but only references to categories and style related artists within the CD Baby website. Is categorized also likes to similarity to known and successful musicians.

The individual pages contain individual songs Clips of two minutes in length, occasionally specimens are also available for all songs of an album. The Clips are available in two levels of quality, even an inferior quality in the form of MP3 files with 32 kbit / s and on the other a medium quality in the form of MP3 files with 128 kbit / s

Buyer

The e- mail addresses of the purchasers of the CDs will be communicated to the artists. The buyer himself can write reviews on this CD website for the purchased CDs.

Famous musicians

These include, for example, Tracy Bonham, who already could bring out several CDs with larger labels and, for example, with the Blue Man Group has toured, as well as Jack Johnson and Regina Spektor, have sold CDs to their record contracts at CD Baby. Better known is possibly Bird York, which has already received an Oscar nomination for a film score for Crash.

History

CD Baby was founded in 1997 by musician Derek Sivers in Woodstock in upstate New York and now has its headquarters in Portland, Oregon, United States. CD Baby now employs about 80 people.

CD Baby has to date more than 245,000 artists are given the opportunity to publish CDs on the Internet. There are more than 4.6 million CDs were sold and paid for about 84 million U.S. dollars to the musician.