A Conversation with Derek Sivers (continued)

PM: I feel I already know the answer to this, but are you what could be called a spiritual guy?

DS: In a way. I don't have a religion, though.

PM: Yeah. Well, I don't think you need one.

[laughter]

DS: "Devout musician." That's a Charlie Parker quote.

PM: And to me, a very enlightened person, a very enlightened businessman.

DS: Well, thanks.

PM: What do you think is on the horizon for you personally, and for CD Baby?

DS: Okay, well, actually, I can answer specifically. For me, personally, I am exactly where I should be. There are times in your life when things aren't going right, and you get the feeling that you've perhaps taken a wrong path somewhere, when it seems like everything is up against you, and it's nothing but obstacles. And then there are times in your life where it's like going down a greased bobsled, everything is going wonderfully, and it just feels to me it's almost like nature's way of saying that you're on the right path. I feel that. What I'm doing right now, I'm just loving it so much, I'm so damn happy every day.

PM: Wow.

DS: And it's making so many other people happy that I'm just feeling really lucky right now, and loving what I'm doing so much, that the trick is to remember, and to know what you love about this. And I think I've identified what I love about this is the thing we mentioned earlier: I love creating a system that can help people more than I like being the one to actually sit there on the phone answering questions or putting CDs into envelopes, or whatever. I like inventing a system that can help musicians. And there are so many more things out there that could help musicians that I would love to help invent and create, with the programming and whatnot. And not just the programming itself, but putting a business into place. I feel like that's my role in life, like that's what I'm here to do. And so I foresee many years to come of me doing exactly this, that I'm already doing right now.

That's for me personally. As far as CD Baby, the cool thing that's going to be happening this year is that we're going to have multiple locations. There's going to be a CD Baby in Japan, and a CD Baby in Canada, and a CD Baby in Europe. The website is going to be in seven different languages or something. CD Baby is going to be much more international this year, because already--oh, we didn't mention this, but since day one, thirty-percent of our orders go overseas.

PM: Wow!

DS: Yeah. But only about three percent of our musicians are from outside the U.S. So here I have this website that's almost entirely American musicians--I should say North American musicians, we have a lot of Canadian artists--that are selling very internationally. To me, the problem to be solved here is that I want to have a native, local representative in Japan who knows the independent music scene there, helping the musicians of Japan to get their music out to the world. And the same thing with Canada, but more in the sense of convenience, so musicians in Canada don't always have to ship their stuff over the border only to have it shipped right back across the border again. But especially in places like Japan and Europe, where a guy from France can send his CD off to the guy in Paris that is CD Baby France, and not have to ship it across the world. And then the office in CD Baby France can keep the local musicians there in a smaller warehouse in France, so that when music fans from France are buying it, it's shipped back directly from France. The system is repeatable, so that a guy at a desk, at a computer, can single-handedly run CD Baby Sweden, or CD Baby France, or CD Baby Japan, because it would just be a small subset to that country.

PM: Right.

DS: It could really be run by one person.

PM: Think globally, ship locally.

DS: [laughs] Yeah. The cool thing, though, is that every musician off in Sweden who signs up with the guy in Sweden gets signed up to the whole international system. We're able to help a musician in Sweden or France or Japan get his or her music up into Apple iTunes and Napster and Rhapsody and Tower Records, and all of other places that we're dealing with, because now they're in our system. So I'm thinking that the international CD Baby is going to be more for the sense of exporting their music out to the world than it is about importing, because we're already doing the importing thing just fine.

PM: Right. [Then we got off on various things about my recent five months in China.]

DS: Wow. Well, I'm leaving for Japan on Monday. I'm going to be there for two weeks, scoping out the scene, meeting some people that are already involved in the independent music scene there. I'm going to try to pick somebody to run CD Baby Japan later this year.

PM: Unbelievable. I'm excited for you, going international. That's such a monstrously major move.

DS: Well, I'm hoping not to make it monstrous. It felt monstrous to me before I really thought deeply about it and realized that I ran CD Baby by myself for the first year or two. All it really takes is a guy with a computer and storage space, like a garage. That's all it would really take to run a CD Baby Japan. One person would be enough to answer emails for four or five hours a day, to stuff envelopes for a couple hours a day, and maybe rip and encode the new incoming CDs for an hour or two a day. All it would really take is one person. So it doesn't need to be some major, scary, corporation-sized undertaking. I think of it more as a local rep, our point person in Japan.

PM: Yeah.

DS: I don't know. At the end of the year, we'll see how it goes.

PM: It's very exciting. Derek, I appreciate you taking all the time today to talk with me.

DS: Cool, Frank. I'm glad we finally got to talk about all this stuff in Puremusic.

PM: It's really interesting stuff. And I hope that we get to hang somewhere in the reasonably near future.

DS: Sometime this year I'm going to do a round of my CD Baby member meetings again, where I show up in fifteen different cities and just pick a venue, have all the musicians from CD Baby from that town just show up, and we meet and network and hang. I'll let you know when I come through Nashville.

PM: That's great. It'll be good to see you.

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