Puremusic interview with Derek Sivers

The way things have been going the last ten years for the music business, I'm very grateful when I hear something that sounds like the voice of sanity in a world gone crazy.

This issue we bring you a conversation with the impressive Derek Sivers, who began the greatest online record store in history, CD Baby, in 1998. This company deals solely with the music of independent artists, and it does so in an unprecedentedly utopian fashion. They have already gone where no music company and damn few companies of any kind have been or even aspire to go.

The vision and the accomplishments to date and to come from CD Baby all begin with the founder, a person who relentlessly adheres to his original blueprint of a company operating with the musician in mind. Consider that when Amazon.com sells your CD, they give you five bucks of the fifteen, and keep the rest. When CD Baby sells it, they keep four bucks and give you Eleven. They also spend vast amounts of brainpower and money coming up with new tools for Indie musicians to market themselves. They build you a handsome page at their website, they will even host Your website, sell you a barcode or database for booking college campus shows, give you the wherewithal to take credit cards for CD purchases at your shows, set you up for selling downloads of your music at every major outlet on the planet, and more. All at much better prices than anyone would offer you in their right mind. And they'll take your calls in their Portland office. Consider that they do this for all their clients, which now number 90,000.

Derek's a very focused person with a legendary attention span. I'll spare you any further introduction, since, in the pages to come, we talk about many things. He's extremely positive, very informative, and an inspiring influence within the chaos of the rapidly shifting music business.  continue to interview