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A Conversation with Derek Sivers (continued)
PM: I was surprised to see that children's music meister Dan Zanes shows up with three titles in the CD Baby bestseller section.
DS: Yeah, he's huge, man. And he has always directed all of his sales to CD Baby. He's out there getting a lot of press coverage. I mean, he has, for years, gotten a lot of press coverage. I mean, constantly--like every time he goes to a town, or even if he's not going to a town, they write a big full-length article about his life and times and what he's doing. The music is good, but he's definitely got a bigger press campaign than anybody else I've seen.
PM: Yeah, he must have a monster publicist, because you see him everywhere.
DS: Yeah.
PM: And hey, it's PG.
DS: And it's a unique angle. I'm always trying to communicate this to musicians, that it's one thing to have a nice little paragraph written about your album somewhere. But when you find the human interest angle to your story, where instead of saying, "Nighttime Lullabies is a great new album by Dan Zanes, it's got some fine songs and good music on it, so check it out."
PM: Yeah, right.
DS: Instead you say, like, "Here's a story of this guy who used to be a college rock star in the '80s, and now time has passed, and he has two daughters, and he went down to the record store to find some music for his daughters, and realized that everything there was so sappy, and he decided it was going to be his mission to make some music that he could stomach as well, that he and his friends could actually enjoy listening to with their kids." So that's the lead-in to his human-interest story that he pitches everywhere. When people write about Dan Zanes, they're not writing about the lyrics, the chords, the music itself, they're writing about the whole story of him and how he got here.
Check this out: If you would have peeked into our top sellers list a year and a half ago, for two solid months, the top seller on CD Baby was a seventeen-year-old classical guitarist from Chicago doing Bach etudes.
PM: Unbelievable.
DS: And the reason he was number one on CD Baby for two solid months is because he had an interesting human interest story about how this young kid from Chicago met Christopher Parkening who took him on as a student, even though he usually doesn't. So WGN Radio did this whole piece on him. And because WGN Radio did it, then WGN TV said that they'd also like to do something on him. And because they did it, the Chicago Sun Times did it, and because the Sun Times did it, the Chicago Tribune did too.
So for two solid months, somewhere every week this kid was getting a major story done on him. And all pretty much from the Chicago area. But it's because they were focusing on his story, that at the end of the story they could basically say, "If you want to hear his album, you can get it on his website." And then his website directed all of his sales to CD Baby. And then it becomes this self-fulfilling prophesy, that because he's number one on the list of top sellers now, when people browse the website, they always want to know who the current top sellers are, and that's what they look at first.
PM: Right.
DS: Gary Jules said the same thing: the reason that, as he was really kind of growing in popularity, he kept sending all of his sales to CD Baby, was that it would feed on itself, that it kept him at the top of the current top sellers list, and people browsing CD Baby would always browse first on the top sellers list. And he told me much later that forty percent of his sales--we counted once, because at the end of the order we tell all the artists where the customer heard of them. And he said that forty percent of his sales were to people just browsing the website who'd never heard of him before.
PM: Just looking at the top sellers.
DS: Yeah. Because he was always on that bestseller list for like a year and a half. I mean, he was directing a significant amount of his fans there. So his fans were keeping it on the list, but then because it was there, he reached a few thousand more people, he sold a few thousand CDs to total strangers just because it was on the top sellers list.
PM: Has Portland turned out to be a good home for the operation?
DS: Hell yeah. I moved it somewhat on a whim, just because I couldn't handle those Upstate New York winters anymore, and it turned out to be so good, man. You've been to Woodstock, right.
PM: Yeah, and Portland, sure.
DS: I mean, Woodstock is a tiny little town in the Catskills, and it was really hard to hire anybody. Even when I was trying to hire my second employee, I had a really hard time finding anybody. Because that kind of town...everybody in Woodstock is either over fifty or under fifteen. It's like the Woodstock generation and their kids.
PM: Right.
DS: Portland is different. I mean, it wasn't so when I moved there in 2000, but shortly after I moved there, Oregon had the highest unemployment in the whole country. Here is this state that was set up like a logging economy and then went high-tech. All of a sudden it was becoming a second Silicon Valley. And when the dot.com bust happened in 2001, Oregon was hit hard. San Francisco had other economies there to keep it going, but Portland really only had high-tech and logging.
So all of these people had moved into Oregon for the high-tech stuff, and then when that went bust, all of a sudden there were so many people in this town they really liked, but without jobs. And so that has really helped us--I mean, CD Baby was able to grow easily because there was always somebody looking for a job. We were getting resumes every day and whatnot. So it has been just an awesome place to have the business. And it's a cool place to be. continue
