Baby Love

Photo by Sarah St. Clair Renard

Whenever there’s a large gathering of independent musicians, like the annual DIY Music conference in Hollywood, it ain’t Frank Black who’s treated like a conquering hero and resident Wise Man of indie rock; it’s Derek Sivers, an odd-looking yet friendly character with disarmingly blue eyes and thick dread-ropes jutting downward from the base of his shiny balding skull.

As founder and CEO of the online music store CD Baby, Sivers has paid out nearly $15 million over the last seven years to more than 93,000 independent musicians, who have used his service to sell 1.5 million CDs. Every Monday night he gets to send off about $200,000 worth of checks to rockers, gospel choirs and one-man novelty acts who don’t otherwise have record deals, managers or distribution contracts. “Which is just my favorite part of my job,” he says with a twinkle. (Included in those 93,000 is a band I’m in, which has sold 121 CDs through the site.) CD Baby keeps $4 of each purchase, offers bands the option to sell each song on Apple iTunes (keeping 9 percent of that), and the rest goes straight back to the guitar-strings fund.

Sivers is a hippie capitalist in the best sense of both words. He will talk to you with equal enthusiasm about how CD Baby is “some kind of karmic obligation to the greater good of the world” and how you really oughtta read Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends & Influence People. His site accepts no advertising or paid search results (“it’s kinda the root of all corruption”), while offering bands free credit-card swipers and $20 UPC bar codes. Numbers 7 and 8 on Derek’s “My Tips on Promoting Your Music” (available at http://cdbaby.net/derek/) are “Have fun — do NOT be corporate” and “Have someone connected working the INSIDE of the industry while you do the groundwork.” He delights in hanging up on venture capitalists, is a staunch believer in schmoozing and maintaining business relationships, and his favorite phrase, usually uttered with childlike wonder, is “How cool is that?” There are no contradictions in any of this.

For the last couple of years, Sivers has been splitting time between Santa Monica (where his wife lives) and Portland (where his company does). After starting off his career as a successful hired-gun guitarist, touring Europe and Japan with the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto, and then later forming a college-circuit act called Hit Me, he now spends much of his time delving into the minutiae of software code to rewrite his site from scratch while the kids up in Oregon take care of business. We met up recently to talk about the expanding horizons for musicians who go it alone.

L.A. WEEKLY: How have things changed in the last five years in terms of bands being able to go their own way and make a living at it?

DEREK SIVERS: I launched CD Baby in March of 1998. I started it because a few months before that, I was a guy with my own CD that I’d made myself, and I was trying to sell it online because I was doing a national radio campaign. I’d hired a college radio promoter, and it was picking up little pockets of interest in places like New Mexico and Central California and Maine, and all these places I knew I was never going to be able to tour. My only means for selling CDs at this time was at shows, and because we were getting these pockets of interest, I wanted to get it up and selling online. I really went searching high and low, and there was not a single place that would do this for you.

I called up CD Now and I said, “Hey, I’ve sold 1,500 copies of it on my own at shows, would you guys like to sell it?” And they said, “Sure, who’s your distributor?”

I said, “Well, I don’t have a distributor.”

“Oh, well, you need to have a distributor.”

I said, “Well, can’t I just be a distributor then, and send you my CDs, and you sell it and pay me?”

And they were like, “Sorry, kid, you gotta go through a distributor.”

So I called up the other big online music stores at the time, and it was the same story — they all said, “Unless you’re going through a distributor, we can’t deal with your products.”

That is so beautifully missing the point of the Internet.

Yeah! I mean it’s just ridiculous: Can’t I just mail you a box of CDs, you put it up, and if somebody orders it, you ship it and pay me?

And so then I started talking to some distributors, and I was really bummed out with the way that that worked, where even a very reputable distributor in New York that came recommended to me, their deal was that they wanted to know that you had about $20,000 in the bank. Their two conditions were: “We like your music, we’ll be glad to work with you, if, number one, you need to be working with a real radio promoter — not college radio, but major radio — because without that it won’t sell. Number two, if you’ve done that, and if a real radio promoter that we approve of has agreed to take on your project, we need to know that you’ve got at least 20,000 bucks in the bank, because we don’t want to be stuck in a position where you do well in the first round, but then you can’t afford to roll out more . . .”