Available in | English |
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Founded | March 10, 1998 , New York, U.S. |
Headquarters | Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
Founder(s) | Derek Sivers |
Industry | Internet, online retailing, online music store |
Products | Compact discs, music downloads |
Website | www |
Advertising | Web banners |
CD Baby, Inc. is an online music store specializing in the sale of CDs, vinyl records and music downloads from independent musicians to consumers. The company is also a digital aggregator of independent music recordings, distributing content to several online music retailers.
CD Baby is one of the few sources of information on physical CD sales in the independent music industry.
CD Baby was the trading name of Hit Media, Inc., a Nevada Corporation founded by Derek Sivers in 1997. Sivers sold CD Baby to Disc Makers in 2008 for what Sivers has reported to be $22 million.
The firm currently operates out of Portland, Oregon. CD Baby allows artists to set their price point for selling physical compact discs – CD Baby retains $4 of every CD sale, the remainder gets paid out to the artist on a weekly basis. They also charge a one-time $49 setup fee per album and $9.99 per single song.
CD Baby was founded in 1998 in , by Derek Sivers. Sivers was a musician who created the website to sell his own music. As a hobby, he also began to sell the CDs of local bands and friends. Sivers originally listened to every CD he sold (the company later employed people specifically to do this, but today, CD Baby no longer listens to every submission).
Sivers, eventually hired John Steup as his vice president and first employee. Currently, there are one hundred or so employees of CD Baby whose work ranges from warehouse work to programming to business development to customer service.
Sivers partnered with Oasis Disc Manufacturing to distribute the complete Oasis artist roster.
Although the majority of artists who use CD Baby are North American, about thirty percent of orders for CD Baby are overseas.
In 2004, CD Baby began offering an online distribution service. By opting into their online distribution service, artists can authorize CD Baby to act on their behalf to submit music for sale to online retailers such as iTunes, Emusic, Rhapsody, Napster, Spotify, Amazon MP3, Google Play, Pandora, 8tracks, Shazam, Apple Music, TIDAL, YouTube Music, Groove Music, Napster, iHeartRadio, eMusic, Medianet, Tradebit, Slacker, 24-7, 7digital, Deezer, Guvera, boinc, GreatIndieMusic, Rara, Yandex.Music, InProdicon, Kdigital, Saavn, AWA, Claro música, Kuack, Amazon Music, MusicMatch, Didiom, and MusicNet, among others. Songs on CD Baby are now also available on Spotify.