The Death of CD Baby

grant — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:31:42 +0000

Alas, all good things must come to and end, and I’m afraid CD Baby’s reign as the musician-friendly, easy-to-use distributer is approaching that time.

The new owner (Discmaker’s Tony van Veen) seems nice enough, and certainly has experience with musicians. But, he lacks the tech savvy that made Derek’s company function in a way that made you feel like you were working with a good friend instead of a clunky corporation.

Last week they launched their “new, improved” artist web site. The “.aspx” in the URL (and the posts in the forum) tells the UNIX programmer that the reliability of the old site has fled the building. Although the new look is nice, the artist’s section was launched, and I’m serious here, without the “accounting” section being active. That’s right – you can’t check your sales. “But”, you ask, “isn’t that what CD Baby is for – to sell music?”. Evidently not any more. It lets you “sign up” a new album. You can even sell it. But you have to wait until they send you the check to see how much you’ve sold, and I hope you’re not trying to keep track of inventory, because that’s gone. This is ironic in the aftermath of questions about CD Baby’s accuracy in reporting sales. Also gone is the easy-to-use album information entry screens. Now there are about 20 different little links to click on to get to pages to enter complicated bits of information. And, those are buggy (broken nav bar links, etc – but of course, “.aspx” already told us that would happen). The staff and management have been scrambling to fix their errors amidst an avalanche of complaints from artists.

Sloppy, careless management, very bad programming, and horrid product development and QA indicate that CD Baby has derailed from the high-quality standards Derek Sivers set and is plummeting down the cliff to a spectacular 70′s-style fiery explosion at the bottom.

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The Death of CD Baby