Ariel Hyatt

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Ariel I wanted to have you here on my premier episode of Sound Advice because you and I have spent the last nine years talking about marketing and PR and many other things. And I really trust your insights and I think musicians really need to hear what you have to say. So I want to dive right in. I want to start out and get the back story of CD Baby because I know a lot of people don’t know it. And since we go in five minute chunks around here, I think a five minute history of CD Baby would be wonderful for people to hear.

Derek Sivers I’ve been a musician my whole life. I’ve been a full time musician since I quit my last job in 1992. I was making a living playing on people’s records and producing people’s records. And then when I put out my own album in like 1997, I did pretty well. I sold about 1,500 copies at live shows. I kind of felt like I was doing pretty good.

Derek Sivers So I called up all the big online record stores at the time, like CD Now and some of the big ones. It’s before Amazon sold CDs. So I called up all the big online stores and I said, “Hey, I’ve got this record. I’ve sold 1,500 copies on my own. Would you guys like to sell it?”

Derek Sivers And they all said, “Well, sure. Who’s your distributor?”

Derek Sivers And I said, “Well, I don’t have a distributor. I don’t need a distributor.”

Derek Sivers They said, “Well, yeah, you do.” They said, “Our stores are really just a front end to the major label distributors. So you have to go get yourself a major label or a large indie record deal and get yourself a distribution deal, and then you’ll appear in our stores.”

Derek Sivers I said, “Well, wait a second. What if I just hung up the phone and called you back and said I’m a distributor?”

Derek Sivers They said, “Look, kid, it doesn’t work that way.”

Derek Sivers And I said, “Well, can’t I just send you a box of CDs and you sell them and pay me? How hard could it be?”

Derek Sivers They said, “No, it just doesn’t work that way. Sorry.”

Derek Sivers I went, “Well, hell, I’ll do it myself. How hard could it be?”

Derek Sivers So this is back in 1997. So I didn’t know anything about computers and I went down to this bookstore and I got a book on cgi-bin computer programming. So I like went and did some computer scripts like okay shopping cart and I made a little shopping cart and I said okay I need to get I need to accept credit cards and that was harder than I thought. It was like a thousand dollars in setup fees and they actually send an inspector out to your location. They make you open a new bank account.

Derek Sivers It’s like oh my god I just want to sell my CD. There’s no PayPal, there was no Amazon, there was like all these tools we have today, like 10 years ago they didn’t exist. And so I was really just like out there on my own and I didn’t, I mean I really went looking to see if there was any single business anywhere on earth that would sell my CD and there were none. Nothing, zip. And so I had to make this in order to sell my CD.

Derek Sivers So the funny thing is that when I was done, some of my friends, like other musicians in New York, I went, “Dude, could you sell my CD?” And I went, “Yeah, okay, sure.” So it was actually my band’s website. My band was called Hit Me. So it was like, “Hit me,” it was like, “Click here to buy my CD.” Then it was like, “Or some of my friends.” And it was like three of my friends on the bottom of my webpage. And then friends told friends, and then it was like eight of my friends on my website. And then I started getting calls from total strangers just like, “Hey, my friend Dave said you could sell my CD.” And I went, “Yeah, okay, sure, all right, I’ll hook you up.” And so I was doing all this as a favor. So the favor just kind of kept on going.

Derek Sivers And then I had to start charging 35 bucks eventually, because it was like I was taking up all my time, all day long doing these favors for strangers now. So I charged 35 bucks. But the important thing is that it was never meant to be a business. And I really think that that set the tone for the company, that the whole thing at its core is just a service to help musicians do what they need doing. It was just set up to help musicians by a musician who was just, you know, a guy out there helping himself. And, yeah, I think that really kind of set the tone for the company.

Derek Sivers So, the cool thing is it’s like 10 years later, and now we’re the largest seller of independent music on the web or whatever, and I think there’s 200,000 musicians using CD Baby now. We’ve done like over 50 million in sales. But at its core, it’s actually the exact same thing it was 10 years ago, which is just this little thing I set up to help musicians, and it’s pretty much the same.

Ariel Wow. So how did it all take off? I mean, obviously one turned to two, turned to eight, turned to ten, but how did you get to a thousand?

Derek Sivers I didn’t. I mean, I mean, that’s the real answer. It’s like, I seriously, um, I just, I really only helped out those first few friends and then those people told other people.

Derek Sivers So I think there’s kind of a lesson in there for musicians that there’s some things that you find yourself doing as a musician that you just feel you’re beating your head against the wall and it’s just not working and nobody wants it and everybody shoots you down. And, you know, this is the exact opposite advice you’re used to getting. Well, actually, okay, you know, there’s conflicting advice. One bit of advice could tell you, “Hey, you know, man, persistence is what pays off.” And you’ll read in interviews with legends, I remember, like Tom Petty, in a Rolling Stone interview, they said, “Hey, there were lots of bands in Florida, like, about your time. Why did you get more famous?” And he said, “All the other ones just quit and we’re the only ones left.” So it’s like persistence pays off, you just keep doing it.

Derek Sivers But then other times, you see people that are just like, it’s just not working people, you know, it’s like that old thing, you’re like, look, they’re just not into you, you know. They don’t like your music. And it’s like, you know, in a way, maybe you should try something new. Like if you’re doing this garage band, maybe you should like try something brand new and do some kind of crazy electronic record or just wear purple suits or something. Like just try something different instead of doing the same thing without changing it.

Derek Sivers So, but then sometimes things just click. So I kind of feel like CD Baby is like one of those hit songs, like I’m a one hit wonder or something. You know, it’s like not like somebody who wrote a hit song is necessarily a better songwriter. It’s just for whatever reason, people wanted to hear, you know, who let the dogs out.

Ariel CD Baby at its core is, Derek always says, a CD store, but it’s really a lot more than that because you did begin to build new services after the original idea. So what else do you offer musicians?

Derek Sivers Well, I kind of changed my answer. I think when I started it I said it was just a CD store because you got to remember the environment: We were in the middle of the dot-com boom and everybody was starting these companies. They couldn’t even tell you what they did. It was like we enable n-tier distribution of stickiness for sharing and client relations. Like, well what do you do? Well we are a portal that enables it. I was like, so what do you do? They couldn’t tell you.

Derek Sivers So my kind of rebellious nature during all that dot-com haze just said, “We’re a record store.” And people would say, “So do you enable .... “ “No, no, no. We’re a record store.” Right. They say, “So you distribute digitally -- “ “No, we’re a record store.” And they go, “Oh, I get it.” So that was kind of -- it was the right answer for the time. But when I look back in hindsight, it’s not like my love of my life was putting plastic discs into envelopes. It’s my love of my life was finding things to help musicians that other people weren’t helping them with. And at the time, 10 years ago, that was distribution.

Derek Sivers It’s like there was nobody doing distribution 10 years ago, and so I had to help out my friends by doing distribution. But now it’s like 10 years have passed, and distribution is so plentiful that you can walk out onto a street in New York City and go, “Hey, I’ve got a record. Who wants to sell it?” And, you know, like 12 companies will go, “We’ll sell it for you. We’ll sell it for you.” So, you know, times have changed in only eight years, which is amazing to me. I think it’s so cool that it’s like the world’s completely flipped upside down.

Derek Sivers The power, like you used to be, as a musician who had a record, you used to be completely powerless and nobody would take your call. Now as a musician with a record, like dozens of businesses will be glad to sell it for you. And I love that. So yeah, so then it leads me to kind of think like, what else do my friends need help with? So these days it’s like, they need help with promotion. They need help with their website. They need help with advice. They need help like, you know, meeting other people that could hook them into different situations. And so yeah, so I like kind of thinking of, well, whatever it is that musicians need. So my answer’s changed.

Derek Sivers I definitely have something to say about this, because the way that albums appear on CD Baby is that as you’re browsing and searching, whatever you see, the album cover, artist name, album title, and a one-sentence description of it. And that is it. So that one sentence is so key, it makes people curious. So I think about this a lot.

Derek Sivers So imagine if, think about it from the other person’s point of view for a second, Because most musicians, if you say, hey, what kind of music do you do? They say, eh, it’s kind of like rock, jazz, soul, kind of funk, kind of classical, kind of country, a little bit Dixie, kind of like hip hop. It doesn’t really sound like anything. You just got to check us out. You know what? Next Thursday night, we’re playing at the Bitter End at 1130, so come check us out.

Derek Sivers OK, so think about this from the other person’s point of view for a second. Let’s imagine you were standing in line at the post office and you ran into somebody wearing a nice suit. You went, well, you look rather clean. Are you in business of some sort? And they say, well, yes, I am. And you say, well, what kind of business is it? Well, you know, I mean, we’ve got this building. It’s kind of like this front door. You know, it’s like we have this thing. You know, our marketing director’s been around for a few years. We got some stuff, you know, it’s kind of profitable. But you know what? We’re out on route 17. We’re open from midnight to 1 a.m. next Thursday only. So you should come check us out.

Derek Sivers It’s like, the fuck, dude? Would I really like get in the car at midnight and drive out route 17 to go check out a business that can’t even tell me what the hell they do? Why the hell would you expect anybody to make any effort to check out your music if you haven’t even told them what the hell you do?

Derek Sivers So, my challenge to every musician is to come up with a few simple words that describe your sound. They don’t need to... The thing is, you don’t need to rationalize your existence for being on Earth. I think that’s the problem, is that some musicians feel that like, “Oh my God, well I can’t find a few words that describe every note of music I’ve ever made and am ever going to make.” So they get nervous and that’s why they end up with these kind of, you know, rock, jazz, funk, classical soul kind of, you know, whatever statements. But instead, if you just find a few words that make people curious to hear more, then you’ve done your job and shut up.

Derek Sivers So, for example, with my own band for years, I was kind of doing that, well, we don’t really sound like anything. And then somebody once said, you know, you sound kind of like a cross between James Brown and the Beatles. I was like, “Good one, I like that.” So then for years after, anytime somebody said, “Oh, what kind of music do you do?” I said, “It’s a cross between James Brown and the Beatles.” And you saw people go, “Dude, I gotta hear that. Do you have a copy?” And it’s like, there you go, mission accomplished. And of course not everything I did sounded like a cross between James Brown and the Beatles, but it was a few words that made people curious.

Derek Sivers In hindsight, when I look back at, I made my living as a musician for 12 years CD Baby ever started. And in hindsight, one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was the time when everything was going really well for my music and I was doing what I love to do best, which was my music, and then I met with this lawyer who kind of told me, it was like this pretty well-known music attorney, who said, “I’ve been watching your career and here’s what I think you should do. You should start a record label and you should sign three other artists to your label. You should produce them and do for their careers what you did for your own and then I can go get you some kind of a sub-label deal with a bigger label and we won’t put all your eggs in one basket, then we’ll sign you as a label instead of as an artist. So that’s what you should do. I went home that day after meeting with him just kind of like, “Yeah, I guess so.” I was like, “I guess that’s what I should be doing. He knows better than I do.”

Derek Sivers In hindsight, it’s easy to see that the only stuff you’re ever going to do well at is the stuff that excites you, because everybody in the world has different things that excite them and different things that bore them and whatever that whatever stuff that you find is draining your energy you need to find a way to stop doing it as soon as possible and Whatever stuff is the kind of stuff that actually like keeps you up until 2 in the morning Which and what I love is that it’s different for everybody. So for some people Booking gigs or promoting gigs is something that keeps them up until 2 in the morning They love booking gigs and promoting gigs. And then for other people, it’s like playing the drums. They love playing the drums, and they’ll play drums until 3 in the morning. And then for other people, it’s like maybe there’s somebody who wants to make a record. You don’t play drums. You don’t want to play drums. So hell, have the guy that loves to play drums do it for you.

Derek Sivers And so you’ve been booking your own gigs for a while, and it’s just like, oh my god, I hate it. I don’t like booking gigs. Then you know what? Find one of those people that loves booking gigs and design your life in such a way so that you’re doing as much of the stuff that excites the hell out of you as possible and as little of the stuff that drains you as possible.

Derek Sivers But it’s like you really have to pay close attention to the compass in your gut, like noticing, like, what’s exciting me and what’s draining me? Because the trick is that sometimes the answer changes. Many times, some of the best booking agents, for example, used to be the bassist in the band. And they were the bass player in the band, and they were like, OK, I’ll book the gigs. They started making some calls. They were like, this is kind of fun. I kind of dig this. In fact, now all my friends work at clubs, and I kind of really enjoy finding good acts to kind of help put it to the clubs. And you know what? I think I’m going to find another bass player for the band, and I’m just going to be the booking agent. So you’ve got to also have the kind of-- again, just pay attention to the compass in your gut to notice what’s truly exciting you, and just do that, even if it’s not what it was two years ago.

Ariel I’m going to add a little bit to that. Yes, but here’s the bad news. When you’re just starting out-- and I get calls all day long from artists that are calling, a lot of them not happy. And they want to know, how do I get a booking agent? I need a booking agent. And I say, great. Well, we’re no longer a booking agent, so I can’t help you with that. But how much money are you making booking yourself? Are you making $100,000 a year? And they scoff sometimes and say, no, we’re not making anywhere near that. And I said, “Great, 10% is what a booking agent makes.” So sadly, most of them don’t just take on projects ‘cause it’s a hobby, they take on projects because they make money booking you. So you’re gonna need to get up into a certain level so that when it’s time for a booking agent to come on board, it’s worth their while.

Derek Sivers Related to this, though, Moby, the techno artist, had a great interview about 10 years ago now almost, where the interviewer asked him, OK, you and I have both been in the New York music scene. It was like Interview Magazine, one of those things. He said, you and I have both been in the New York electronic music scene for like 20 years. Why did you get so much more success than your peers? There were a lot of people making music just as good as you or whatever, yet you were the one that kind of became more famous. Do you know why that is?

Derek Sivers And to his credit, Moby actually knew the answer. He said, yeah, I’m really glad you asked because-- he said, I know that all of my friends were trying to do everything themselves. They were hanging up all the flyers on telephone poles, and they were trying to do all the calls themselves and everything. And he said, I saw that they were spending hours and hours per week hanging up flyers on telephone poles or whatever. So I spent hours and hours per week meeting other people that were great publicists and great promoters and great record labels great managers and great financial managers or whatever. So he said it was just the same amount of work that they were spending doing, you know, flyering telephone polls. I spent that same amount of work meeting people who were the best at what they do. So a year later, they were still hanging up flyers, and a year later I had a team of people that I had, you know, finally won over that believed in my music and wanted to take a chance on me and stuff like that. So he said it’s just a difference in what you spend your attention on or spend your work on.

Derek Sivers Smokey Robinson when he came to speak at Berklee College of Music. And I think, did Smokey Robinson write “My Girl”? Okay. So he told a story about “My Girl” and I think he and a co-writer or something like that wrote “My Girl” and they were trying to get it recorded by somebody or something like that that was in New York. They were living in Detroit. The people that they were pitching it to lived in New York. And they flew out to New York to play the, “Hey, we’ve got this song. We really believe in it.” And they played it for them and the guys went, “Eh, it’s not quite there yet.” They flew back to Detroit and spent like another 40 or 50 hours crafting every single note. “Well, what if we change this note? What if we change that word?” And they flew back to New York and played it for them again after two weeks and they were like, “Better, but not quite doing it for us.” They flew back to Detroit for another two weeks. They changed the intro. They changed the bridge. They did this like, “Ah, what about that bass line that we put in the, the after the hook? What if we put that as the intro?” Like, “Oh, that’s a good way to start the song, isn’t it? Okay, now that I’ve got ‘Sunshine Thing,’ let’s make that the opening line. Yeah, okay.” Now they went back to New York a third time, played it for them, they’re like, “Oh, that’s good. I think we got a hit.”

Derek Sivers A lot of artists, unfortunately, do that thing where they think that whatever the first thing that poured out of their mouth, the first thing that fell under their fingers is how the song has to be. And they forget about the absolutely crucial importance of crafting a song and improving it. It’s not sacred. It’s not a stone tablet sent down from Mount whatever with Moses or something. It’s like everything can be improved and until every note and every word and every syllable and every chord and every arrangement is like perfect, there’s always room for improvement. So I think that for most musicians, three hours spent improving your music does a hell of a lot more for your career than three hours spent on MySpace.

Derek Sivers A lot of musicians vaguely want something and they don’t know what it is, which is a shame that they say something like, okay, I get to be a smartass about this, when they say, “We’re trying to find a booking agent.” And so I say, “Well, which one?” And they say, “Well, what do you mean?” I said, “Well, if you’re trying to find a book, which booking agent are you trying to find?” They say, “Well, I don’t know, we just need a booking agent.” I’m like, “Well, you know, there’s an internet out there. You can go find out like who’s the booking agent for the bands that you like, or you can talk to the clubs that you want to play in, call them up, ask them which agents book acts into their venue, and you can find out like how do you expect to find somebody if you don’t even know their name? And here’s the internet, you’ve got, there’s no excuse for not knowing the name of what you’re trying to find or who you’re trying to find. So if you’re trying to find a booking agent, spend three stupid hours finding the names of the booking agents you want to reach and then go find them. So even the worst answer is when you hear people saying, “I don’t know, we’re just trying to find somebody to help us get our music out there.

Ariel That’s like looking for a job going, I don’t know, I can do anything. It’s like it gives people no context.

Derek Sivers Remember, there was an old Seinfeld episode where George Constanza gets fired. He’s like, what do you want to do? “I like sports.”

Derek Sivers So if you find yourself being vague in what you’re searching for, you’re not going to find it until you get specific. So if you’re saying, I don’t know, I just want to find somebody that’s going to help us get our music out there. It’s like, no, no, no. You need to sit down for even a mere hour and define who that is you’re actually looking for. Are you actually looking for a publicist? Are you looking for a manager? And if the manager, then manager of what acts? What other acts would they be managing that you’re compatible with? Use a directory, do a Google search, find their names, then try to reach them. It’s like not that hard.

Ariel Derek has a blog and on it recently posted some really, to me, mind-blowing statistics about, well, the percentage of artists and what they sell at CD Baby. Can you talk about that?

Derek Sivers Yeah. It was interesting to me too. Somebody asked me recently like, “Well, what percentage of your artists make up 50 percent of your sales or something like that?” And I said, “Wow, I never really ran that query before.” So I kind of asked the database, you know. And it was interesting that 10 percent of our artists make up 90 percent of our sales.

Derek Sivers So it kind of leads to that idea where every now and then people ask me, So what does the average artist on CD Baby sell? And I say, well, there isn’t really an average. You’ve got to understand there’s a couple different types of artists. Some musicians, when they put out a record, it’s like the starting gun has gone off. It’s like the record’s done and they’re like, here we go. We’re going to tour. We’re going to promote. We’re going to tell everybody we are going to hit this thing so constantly that every bit on earth is going to buy it. So an artist like that will sell an average of like 100 or 200 CDs through us.

Derek Sivers But then there’s some artists that it’s like, they have a comfortable job as a chiropractor, they’ve always wanted to make a record but never did, they got some friends together, or they spent some of their chiropractor money and hired some top Nashville cats or whatever, and they made the record of their dreams. And it’s, they get the pretty artwork done, and they put it out, and it’s like, “I did it. I made a record.” And they put it on CD Baby to give it some kind of legitimacy, like, “See? And it’s for sale.” And then they never even tell anybody. They’re done. And that artist may sell an average of one CD, because they don’t tell anybody. And so it’s a shame is that you can’t go look at the chiropractors album and say, “Eh, he only sold one copy,” you know. Because if you’re somebody that’s committed to promoting and working it, you’re gonna do well. You can’t compare yourself. It’s like two different approaches to a career.

Ariel Wow, that’s very, very interesting. So, is there...so there’s nothing that differentiates the artists that sell from the artists that don’t, aside from the fact that the ones that sell seem to have a little bit more gumption around it.

Derek Sivers Okay, well there’s lots of things that differentiate them actually. It’s not the quality of music though. There’s some people making amazing records that just don’t sell a single copy because they don’t tell anybody about it, you know. I mean, you’d be surprised.

Derek Sivers Okay, actually, you know, an enlightening day for me when I was 19 years old, I went to one of those educational music seminar days in Chicago where they’d had some band that was like, I forget what they were, but they were kind of like the Smashing Pumpkins of the day. They were like a big band from Chicago that had like come back to speak at this educational event for the day. And I remember just being a 19-year-old thinking I was going to go get a record deal or whatever. And what he said was really interesting.

Derek Sivers He said, “Guys, you know what? In hindsight, getting the record, getting signed was the easy part.” He said, “After we got signed, that was like the hardest three years of my life because Every day you have to like be up at 5 a.m. to go do the early 6 a.m. radio interview, then you have to do the 10 a.m. in-store, then you have to do the 12 o’clock interview, then you have to do the afternoon warm-up, then you have to do the nighttime show, then go hit the road and drive for 12 hours to get there in time to do the 6 a.m. interview again, the 10 a.m. And they said, “I always thought that when I got signed that the record label would go make people buy my CD.” He said, “No, it was me.” He said, “We had to go win over fans one at a time and our record label was just the somewhat brainless organization that got it into the shelves so that as we were making people love our music, it was there for them to buy. And I think that’s what musicians still don’t understand is they think that, “Boy, if I just had a label, then I could just sit back and everybody would appreciate my genius.”

Ariel All our problems will be solved. And I see that too. When bands get dropped, all of a sudden, their fan list is not in their control or they realize they’ve let go of a lot of their contacts and it can be disastrous.

Derek Sivers Yeah, so it’s, bad news is, or good news, depending on how you think about it, it’s still all up to you. It’s like, whether you get signed or not doesn’t really matter, that’s just it’ll be a little more infrastructure behind you, but it’s still up to you. You will never be able to just sit back and have somebody else make people want your music. You’re still going to have to learn how to win over fans, one at a time on a day to day level. the musicians who understand that now will do well. They’ll do well in gigs and booking bigger venues and getting a bigger audience. They’ll do well in sales, both digital and physical. They’ll do well in meeting connections ‘cause they realize you can’t just sit back and wait for the most brilliant booking agent to approach you and say, “Hey, I hear you’re brilliant.” You have to still go approach people. So it’s like, I think that’s the difference. The type of musicians that realize that they have to do all the work it do well and those that don’t and they sit at home, get high, watch TV, complain, don’t do well.

Ariel I want to get into basic steps. So an artist is up on CD Baby, they’ve gotten into your digital distribution system and their CD’s ready to go. What should they do? What’s the first step they should take?

Derek Sivers I think a lot of musicians ask this question that’s like, you know what they’re kind of thing I should be doing? Like, what’s the one thing I’m missing? I’m not famous yet, I’m not selling, what’s the one thing I’m missing? But the answer is that there is no one thing. And that’s why it’s hard to find that, especially if you try to put too much weight onto thinking, it’s almost like people want to say, “Oh, well, here’s a phone number you need to dial and type a secret passcode and then you’ll be famous.” That it’s not any one thing. And the most successful are the ones that are constantly doing lots of They’re constantly, every day, making some phone calls and constantly, every day, working on their songwriting and very specifically improving it, not just letting your first draft become your final, but actually going back to songs that you’ve written and fixing them and improving them and meeting a few people every week, a few new people that could possibly help your career, things like that.

Derek Sivers So it’s really, the cool thing is that once you realize that it’s no one thing, you can have more of a carefree, “Hey, let’s try it,” kind of attitude. So I love sentences that start with, like, “Let’s see what happens if.” Because that’s where all the fun stuff happens. “Let’s see what happens if we email our mailing list.” I know a band that did this, by the way. “What happens if we email our mailing list and tell them not to come to next Thursday’s gig?” that they said one of the most successful things they ever did after two years of emailing their list saying, “Hey, please come to our show. Please come to our show.” They said, “Let’s see what happens if.” They said, “All right, everybody. Please do not come to our show next Thursday night at, you know, bitter end or whatever, because, um, honestly, we’re gonna do some new stuff that will just blow your mind. You will not be able to sleep at night. It’s really just gonna freak you out. So don’t come to that show.” And of course everybody went, “Oh, I gotta go.” If they’re saying not to, that sounds interesting.

Derek Sivers So it lets you try fun stuff once you realize there is no one thing. So go try crazy things. I know some band once it like went and like picketed the Howard Stern Show wearing like hazmat suits or something like that. And Howard’s just like, “What the hell are these guys? Come on, bring them on upstairs.” And you know, you just gotta have fun with it. Try stuff and just try lots of things knowing that it won’t be any one big thing that makes all the difference.

Derek Sivers I interviewed Nicole Blackman, who was a publicist in kind of like mid-late 90s that was really successful at the time. And she was kind of at the peak of her publicist career where everybody wanted to work with her and she was so swamped. And I interviewed her for this magazine I was working with. And she said something that just really stuck with me.

Derek Sivers She said, “We get so many packages in the mail each day “that we have a giant refrigerator-sized box “by the front door, and every single package it comes in just gets thrown in that box and ignored. And she said, then when we get a follow-up call from somebody saying, “Did you get my package?” She’ll say, “Well, have you called before?” “Well, no, I haven’t called before, but I haven’t heard from you.” I’ll say, “Oh, okay, we’ll get back to you.” And the fact that they hadn’t called before meant it was still in the refrigerator-sized box. They’d find it in the refrigerator box and dump it in a second box. Then they’d wait for the second call back. And if somebody said, “I still haven’t heard from you. Did you get my package? I haven’t heard your thoughts on it.” Then they’d say, “Oh, they seem pretty serious.” take it out of the smaller box and put it on a desk and still maybe get to it but maybe not and when the third follow-up call would come. Like, this is, you know, they’d say, “I haven’t heard from you.” They’d say, “How many times have you called? This is my third time calling.” They’d go, “Oh, it must be here on the desk somewhere.” And then they’d say, “We’ll get back to you.” And now they knew that that person was serious. And this is what she had to do to filter out the unserious people because the ones who really, really, really wanted to work with her would call three times. And the ones who were less serious would like send a package once and give up. So I summarize this by saying that persistence is polite. That it’s actually the considerate thing to do is to understand the position that they’re in where they get tons of people calling them each day or whatever. And the considerate thing is to not be mad at them for this. The inconsiderate thing to do is to send somebody a package once or, you know, contact somebody once, not hear back from them, and then just for the rest of your life go, “She’s a bitch. She never got back to me. Fuck them.” So yeah, persistence is polite. Understand that the people that you’re trying to reach are swamped in calls.

Derek Sivers Sometimes even my good friends have to call me like three times before I get back to them, you know, because I’m just like swamped in CD Baby stuff. So yeah, so understand that, that you just need to kind of like be persistent until you get a definite yes or no.

Derek Sivers You know, there are some people who, like for example, were calling CD Baby every week for a year to ask if we had job openings. Like, “Hey, I really want to work there. Hey, it’s me again. I really want to work there.” And after a year, like 50 calls over the course of a year, all of a sudden one day we were hiring and they’re like, “Yeah, you know what? You really do seem to want to work here. Come on in.”

Derek Sivers It brings up another thing you and I were talking about once, about this thing that I call like, “Call the destination and ask for directions.” That means that-- kind of like we were talking about how you need to specifically define what you’re looking for. You can’t just say, I need an agent. It’s like, well, I’m trying to reach Jim Miller, the agent who works with the Black Crows. Now you can get somewhere.

Derek Sivers So same thing that if you ever find yourself just kind of like sitting on your couch just like, all right, I’ve made some good music. I don’t know what to do next. Like, I made a CD. What now? What you need to do is think about where you want to be. And then it’s actually possible to pick up a phone and ask them, “How do I get there?” So it’s like you call, like, think about the venue in town that you think you should be playing at. Um, that might just be like the next step for you. Maybe not, you know, you don’t call Madison Square Garden and say, “Yo, how do I get a gig there?” You know? But you know, you call up the club that you feel like is your next step. Call up the person that, uh, that does the bookings. And it might take you a few weeks to get them on the phone. You might have to call ten times, whatever. And you get them on the phone.

Derek Sivers And you say, “Hey, I’m not trying to book anything today. I just have a quick question for you. Someday I would love to play your club and I’m just wondering what do you recommend, like, what’s your criteria for booking an act in your club? What criteria do you need to see that they’ve already sold X number of tickets at some other venue? Do you need to know that they’re working with certain agents? If you could, please, just I will gladly, you know, treat you to a box of chocolates or whatever, you know, bribes can be nice. They’re just a good gesture, you know. Um, then, uh, you just say, “Just a minute of your time. That’s all I need. Please just tell me your criteria for deciding who to book. They can tell you and you can say, okay, thanks for your time. And now you know how to get a gig at that club, and you can set that as your goal to get there.

Derek Sivers I was talking about this subject once at a conference in Nashville. And when I mentioned this subject, this guy in the back of the room stood up and just like, ooh, ooh, ooh, I got to tell you what happened to me. I said, all right, tell your tale. And he said, okay, I had this band. We’d been playing in Nashville for like seven years. He said, we’re just playing the same clubs. “We always wanted to get into festivals. “We felt that we were like a big summertime “crowd party festival band, “but could never quite crack the festival circuit.” And he said, “So there we were one night, “playing,” and he said, “You know, many times “we’d sent packages to the guy “that does the booking for festivals “and just never got his attention. “He never returned our call.” And he said, “One night we’re playing “some kind of dive bar, and in between songs, “this drunk dude comes up to the stage and says, “You know what you are? You guys are hillbilly flamenco.” And the band laughed and the audience laughed. And then it’s like later in the gig, like the band was still laughing about it. And they said, “Hey, where’s the hillbilly flamenco guy? That was brilliant. Buy that guy a drink on us.” And at the end of the show, they asked the audience, “What was that phrase again?” And the audience goes, “Hillbilly flamenco.” And so driving home that night from the gig, the band went, “Guys, you know, we’re still laughing about it. I think we’re onto something.” And so they said, let’s try this as an experiment. From now on, when anybody asks us what kind of music we make, let’s say “Hillbilly Flamenco.” People seem to like that answer. And he said, Derek, those two words, like you could see as soon as we started saying those two words and people would say, what kind of music, our career took a turn. So now what we start doing is at gigs, we tell the audience our name. And we’d say, hey, if you’re wondering what kind of music you’re hearing tonight, this is “Hillbilly Flamenco.” And the audience would laugh. And then at the end of the gig, they’d say to the audience, so tomorrow when your co-workers say, hey, what kind of music was it the other night? What are you going to tell them? And the audience went, Hillbilly Flamenco. So all of a sudden, you’re making it easy for people to talk about you because you put words in their mouth. You put some small, easy words in their mouth that makes it easy for them to tell their friends, which is exactly what you need to happen.

Derek Sivers So he said that the cool thing was that not only did attendance at their show start shooting up, all of a sudden, doors started opening, and then the magic thing happened. that festival booker that they were always trying to get his attention. So yet again, now for like the fourth year in a row, they were like, reached him, you know, in the winter when he’s preparing his summer thing. And he said, “What kind of music is it?” And they said, “Hillbilly flamenco.” And the guy goes, “Oh, I gotta hear this. Okay, here, let me give you my real address. Send it here. This is the one I actually listen to.” So it’s like you come up with a short, fun phrase that describes your music and it’s just like doors magically open for you.

Derek Sivers I started noticing that the best-selling albums on CD Baby were the ones that were sharply defined as kind of like, that went for something specific. So I kind of, I was trying to explain this to people and I thought of a good metaphor to explain it. Like, think of the typical archery range, right? Where you have like a bullseye on the other side of a grassy field and you’ve got your arrow and you’re trying to hit it. that for decades, you know, whatever, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, that bullseye was like one inch and it was a hundred, whatever, yards away. And it was just this thing that you try your shoot, shoot your arrows at it, and your arrows would pretty much always miss, unless by chance you hit it dead in the center and you wrote something that the mass public wanted to hear, and then you’d be a massive bullseye hit. So, and then if you weren’t a massive hit, you were nothing. So what’s interesting is that in just the last 10 years, things have completely changed. So now we’ve got this, the Internet’s made it a world of millions of niches. So now it’s like that target on the other side of the Archer Range is actually like a hundred feet across. And it’s, it’s massive and there are plenty of places you can hit. You can just shoot your arrows and just have fun. But the trick is, is that it’s like somebody sneaky went and kind of like cut, took a little saw and cut out the middle of the target so there is no middle. So if you’re trying to aim dead mainstream now, and you’re trying to write a mainstream hit for the average person in the world about average things, if that’s where you’re aiming, you’re gonna hit nothing. And if you just aim anywhere near the side, and you do anything weird, you’re going to get the public’s attention more.

Derek Sivers So, I’ve got a good specific example of this. Regina Spektor is this artist that had, she had three albums on CD Baby, where she was doing pretty normal stuff. I mean, it was more like kind of a well-paved path. It was kind of like Tori Amos, kind of arpeggiated, chick with a warbling voice and piano, kind of doing these wispy songs and lots of arpeggios on the piano. And then she did three albums that did pretty well. And then it’s like around her fourth album, like something in her brain just kind of, you got the feeling, she just said, “Ah, fuck it.” And just started getting weirder. So all of a sudden, like the opening song is called “Ode to Divorce” and it’s about, like, I’m in your tonsils looking at your molars, and I like your breath with a minty kiss and something. And then the second song is called “Poor Little Rich Boy,” and then she takes a drumstick and, like, hits her piano chair, her bench, while she’s playing with her left hand and her right hand is, like, down there whacking her chair with a stick. And it’s, like, the weirder she got, people’s heads started turning, and they’re just like, what was that?

Derek Sivers And I actually like that Eminem, of all people, said that that’s his goal when he’s writing his lyrics. He said, “I want to write something so out there that when people are talking over it at a club or a restaurant and it comes on that they’ll stop talking and go, ‘Did he just say what I think he just said?’” And it’s like, that’s kind of what you want to do musically. You’ve got to do something that cuts, that just...

Derek Sivers It’s like I kind of think about it like the world has this kind of like big foggy cloud of attention. It’s almost like a big, you know, hunk of cheese that’s the world’s attention. But if you’re well-rounded, like if you say, “Hey, I’m all things to all people, and my name is Mark Smith, and I made a record about me, and it’s about my life, and I think it’ll apply to all of your lives,” then it’s like, “Dude, nobody’s gonna pay attention to this well-rounded record.” But if you get sharply defined, if you think that the way to cut through something is to be sharp as a knife, if you sharply define what you’re doing and you say, “This is an album about sailing. This is an album only for sailors. If you’re not a sailor, you won’t like it. So get out of my way 99.99% of the world, because this.1% is going to dig it. I guess that would be.01%, wouldn’t it?

Derek Sivers So if you do that, then all of a sudden, you found this niche and you can get the attention of people in that niche and be sharply defined, exclude the rest, and it’s like, now you can get somewhere because you’ve sharply defined.

Derek Sivers What I think is interesting is that you look at some long careers, like the first ones that come to mind are Paul Simon, David Bowie, Madonna, and Elvis Costello are four artists off the top of my head that they use the album as their niche, that they have a well-rounded career. But you look at David Bowie as almost the most obvious example, that he’s like, “Now my name is Ziggy Stardust and I’m from Mars. Now I’m the thin white duke. Now I’m the androgynous Diamond Dogs. Now I’m kind of like 80s suited blonde man. Now I’m post-punk Nine Inch Nails. It’s like he used his albums as a niche.

Derek Sivers Or you think of like Paul Simon doing like, now I’m making a gospel record. Now I’m making a South African record. Now I’m making a Brazilian record. And his last record is like this kind of like techno thing with Brian Eno. And I think that’s a great way, like if you’re feeling like, wait, but I have more to offer. I don’t want to just be a tiny niche to the world. It’s like, okay, we’ll just make this album a niche. Like put together a collection of songs that are very niched and market it in a very niched way.

Derek Sivers I was in London over the summer. And almost as soon as I got there, they had this show called Britain’s Got Talent that was kind of like American Idol or whatever. And this guy, this kind of quite ugly car, this guy that worked at a cell phone company called Carphone Warehouse. basically like the best buy of England. Lowly car phone warehouse salesman with bad teeth said that he wanted to be an opera singer. And then he kind of came out there and sang. It was just like amazing. He ended up winning the entire thing. And now he has like a hit record in England. And he’s, you know, performing like star on Broadway kind of thing. And people actually do love that story. Everywhere that ever talked about him loved mentioning. It’s like, and look at this. this guy, he’s just got a lowly job at a lowly kind of Best Buy or whatever, but he had the music in him and they kind of loved that story. So I don’t think you should be afraid to talk about your day job. You know, it depends for all, it’s different for different genres. He was doing opera, whereas if you’re trying to be like a cool, you know, metal band, you know, or whatever, it might not be so cool to talk about your day jobs or whatever. But yeah, you shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it. I think it’s, people like that angle.

Derek Sivers I get this question a lot, like people kind of think like, “Yeah, but what should I be doing online? Like, what about-- what about some online advice?” I think, you know, online is just-- it’s just people. Don’t forget. It’s not like, “Hey, how do I market myself to robots?” It’s like, it’s still just people on the other end. It’s OK, yeah, you’re using your computer keyboard and some wires to connect to them instead of, you know, putting your arm around somebody at a bar or something. But it’s the exact same techniques. You can’t think that it’s like an entirely different world, that you have to do entirely different things. It’s still human nature. So I mean, the basic principles still apply about thinking of things from the other person’s point of view.

Derek Sivers When I think about like, why do people really go out to a bar on a Thursday night? Because they wanna hear your tight harmonies and your introspective lyrics and listen to how tight the bass and the drums are locking together? Or is it because they had a shitty day at work and they just wanna relax and have a beer and see some cute people at the bar and flirt and hang out, and you’re there to just entertain them or make the room feel cool or whatever, depending on your kind of music. Um, so, I think being considerate of others is the, is still the real point. And whatever you’re using to do that, whatever you’re using to get people’s attention, or win their hearts, or, uh, do something outstanding, it’s still, the, the thing that you’re using to reach other people is not the point.

Derek Sivers I was at this conference once just a few years ago where it was like the internet marketing panel and their big question was, yes, but has the internet truly broken a new artist yet? So this internet thing, this fad that we’re in right now, can this truly break a new artist? And I was like, guys, can you imagine like in the 80s saying like, hey, so we’ve got this fax machine technology, but has the fax machine truly broken an artist? Is this a valid technology? Can it break a career? It’s like, it’s just another way to get a message from me to you, from him to her, for people to tell each other. So it’s like, you don’t want to like spend too much time focusing on the technology itself. Just, you’ll do much better if you remember that it’s all just people at the receiving end. And the receiving end is the real point, not, you know, which wire out of your house the message went over.

Derek Sivers All these webmasters out there and all these people with blogs and websites, they’re kind of like the new editors of Rolling Stone in a way. Except now luckily instead of one magazine called Rolling Stone, there’s like a million magazines called Rolling Stone Klezmer. And reach those people, because you’d be surprised, like it’s not that hard to go to a fan site of Klezmer music and you click contact, you see who’s running the site, and you send them an email and you say, “Hey, I’m really enjoying your site. I love the fact that you put it together. And in fact, I’m also a musician here in Philadelphia, and I think you would really like my music. and could I send you a copy and see what you think?”

Derek Sivers But I think that would be my next baby step advice to any band is to start diving down your niches. Don’t go Google searching saying music distribution, independent sales or whatever. Put yourself into the mindset of a fan and see where that kind of discovery process takes you and then get your music to those places.

Derek Sivers On that note, you have to prove to them that you’re not spamming. Sometimes people will send me an email, and it takes me until the third paragraph before they’ve actually mentioned me or CD Baby, and it’s like, I’m about to hit delete because it looks like something they’ve sent to 100 people. I’m like, delete. It’s like, oh wait, they are actually writing to me. So make sure that you very, you know, if you’re contacting these places yourself, make sure that you very specifically mention, just like, you know, I love the fact that you did a feature about such and such band, and I thought this was great, and that’s why I think that you will like this.

Derek Sivers A lot of musicians, they think that, you know, here we are in a recording studio, right? So we’re here in a recording studio. So they think that at the moment they’re writing their lyrics and writing the song and they’re playing the piano and they got the guitar and they’re making the music and then they’re recording it. They’re creative throughout the entire process. And then even in the recording process, you stay creative.

Derek Sivers You took this basic words and music idea you had and you decided what instrumentation you felt represented the song the best. And then you go into the studio and you decide what kind of recording would represent the song the best. Do you want a very natural, earthy kind of sound, or are you going for something twisted and distorted? So that’s a creative decision. And then even they put together the album, whether it’s even the choice of your band name, or the artwork on the cover of the album you put together, is a creative decision.

Derek Sivers And then all of a sudden it’s time to promote it, and they go like, “Tell me exactly what I should be doing.” And they read, you know, “Billboard Guide to Touring and Promotion.” They say, “Okay, it says I should have exactly this, like this, and I should do things, and I should stick this here, and I should write a cover letter that says this.” And all of a sudden, they lose all their creativity.

Derek Sivers And I think one of the smartest things you could do as a musician is to carry that creativity that carried you through the entire process, and carry it into your promotion and marketing. To have fun with it, and have it be, and this is the important part, is like, have it be a further extension of your art so that the way that you contact people should be an extension of your art.

Derek Sivers For example, there is like this rockabilly band that when he calls up CD Baby, he’s just like, “Hey dude, what’s up motherfuckers? I’m calling to see if you got my new record.” It’s like he carries his onstage persona into every phone call he makes.

Derek Sivers And whereas you have the delicate wispy girl with a piano that will say, “Hi, my name is Tracy and I’m wondering if maybe you got my music and if you would like it because I think it captures the spirit with the the moon is covering the sun right now and so now might be a good time to feature it you know it’s like that’s her thing you know.

Derek Sivers So there was this band I produced my friend had a record he called it we went to high school together and everything so I’m not gonna tell you his real name but he called himself Captain T and it was like while the X-Files was on the air he does develop this whole kind of like X-Files persona called Captain T that was all about exposing the secrets of Area 51 and the aliens and the government cover-ups. And they did this like twisted, distorted cover version of the song “We Are The World.” And so he had these songs about, you know, the rights of aliens and Area 51 and set them free. And the album cover was like a Martian crucified on Mars, you know. And so when it was time, we had a blast making the record. We were laughing all the way through it. It was just a hilarious, fun, great record. And then when it was time to market it, I found myself on the verge of like, doing the normal thing, right? Like sending out manila envelopes to radio stations. And I was like, “Wait, what am I thinking? Like, no way. We can- let’s have some fun with this. I gotta take my own advice.” And so here’s what we did. We got 500 jet black envelopes. This is to send it out to college radio, right? We got 500 jet black envelopes. Um, 500 kind of sheets of this oatmeal brown paper. And then I did a mail merge with the kind of college database, a college radio database, and so that every letter started out with the person’s name in it. So it was like, “Dear Mark,” and so here’s the letter we wrote. It said, “You don’t know me, but I live in the bushes behind your station. I’ve been listening to KEXP for 30 years here from the bushes, and I’ve got to say that you’ve saved my life many times over when I was on the brink and thinking of calling it quits, But the other day, as I was laying face down and licking the gutter, a man named Captain T came and pulled me out of the gutter, and he taught me the real truth about what’s going on out there and the way that the government’s trying to turn us all into robots, man, and they’re... “Your job, KEXP, to let the world know the truth, and Captain T is the man to help spread that truth, and his message must be heard,” and then illegible scribble at the bottom of the page. So we printed out 500 of these to the 500 different radio stations and literally went in the backyard and rubbed each one in dirt, crumpled it up into a little ball, uncrumpled it, stuck the CD in the middle, stuck it into a jet black envelope, sealed it up, and then the finishing touch. Just as we were about to send these out to the radio stations, Captain T found from a stationery store a red and white sticker that said, “Absolutely confidential. Do not open.” sealed every envelope with that.

Derek Sivers So now, it’s all about being considerate, right? So imagine that you’re some 19-year-old kid working at a college radio station in Maine. And you’ve got 100 regular envelopes in the mail with all these CDs and things that people want you to play. And then you get this one. It’s like Jet Black saying, absolutely confidential, do not open. It’s like-- you open it up. It’s like this dirty, crumpled mess comes out. It says, you don’t know me, but I live in the bushes behind your station.” It’s like, “Dude.” Now it’s like, in the name of, you know, you’ve done a few things at once then. You’ve taken your creativity, you’ve made your marketing an extension of your art. And it’s actually very considerate because it’s considering the people on the receiving end who receive the monotonous same thing in the mail every single day. And now you’ve done the creative thing to reach them. You just made that person say, “So still...” And by the way, with no budget whatsoever, we promoter it was just us mailing out 500 packages, 350 of the 500 radio stations we sent it to played it. And still to this day, Captain T will occasionally run into somebody that’ll like bump into him at a club and say, “Oh my God, you’re Captain T? Dude, I remember when we got your CD at University of Maine. That was amazing!” So it’s like carrying for your creativity into the promotion of your music can be one of the smartest things you do, whether you’re using the internet or fax machines or whatever.

Derek Sivers There’s some wisdom to be gained from anybody. Ask everybody’s opinion. Why not? Ask it. But you can’t think that they really know. You know what’s best for you. You can pick up little tidbits of wisdom from all these different sources and then you have to digest it yourself and know what excites you the most, what applies to your specific thing the most.

Derek Sivers People often try to, we get people calling CD Baby saying, “So I’ve got this hip hop band, “so how well does hip hop sell on CD Baby?” I’m like, “Why does it matter? “Like, if you’ve got something amazing, “you could be the biggest selling hip hop artist “in the whole world.” And sometimes, like I almost feel that people are almost setting themselves up for failure.

Derek Sivers Here’s a very specific one. I wrote an article about the music scene in Japan. I went over to Japan for a couple weeks, a while back, and I wrote up my findings. Uh, and one of the things was like, they have this whole thing with like, Black Americans. They, they’ve kind of romanticized the notion of like, American R&B, American soul music. And I noticed a weird thing that, um, that when we have albums on CD Baby, where it’s a Black artist who puts themselves on the cover, it sells well. They put something else on the cover, a sunset, a beach, doesn’t sell. And so I would get these artists, um, after I wrote this article, emailing CD Baby saying, hey, so we’ve got this band, it’s really good R&B, but we’re not black. Do you think it would do well in Japan? And I have to say, you know, what are you expecting me to say? If I say no, are you going to break up the band and never make a phone call and never contact Japan and just give up because I said no? And if I say yes, are you going to say, great, let’s go and hop on a plane and give it your all? In that case, yes, sure. Then it’s like, is that seriously going to change your path?

Derek Sivers And if so, it’s like-- so I started doing this thing where we ended up just pretty much-- this is going to sound really bad. I’m confessing a secret on camera here. Why not? For years, we would get people not really understanding how CD Baby works, that we’ll sell anything. It’s just a system I set up so that anybody can sell through it. And every now and then, almost like once every week or two, we’d get somebody who would mail one copy of their CD saying, hey, “Hey, check out my album and let me know if it’s something you guys would like to sell on CD Baby.” And so for a year or two, I had kind of a stock response where I just sent them back something saying, “Hey, well, thanks for the record and you know, it really doesn’t matter what we think of it. We’ll be glad to sell it either way. I mean, I could hate it, I could love it, it doesn’t matter. I’ve just got a system where you can sell your stuff.” And people would go, “Oh, okay.” And they’d be a little bummed out. And then I thought about this whole like yes/no thing, giving up versus enthusiasm. And so I just changed my form letter. I said, “Great! Love it! Kick ass! Rock and roll, dude! It’s awesome! We’d love to sell it! I think it’s gonna do really well!” And people go, “Really? This is awesome!” And now they’re all excited and now because it’s like, I sent them a different form letter, they’re all renewed and they’re full of confidence. They’re like, “Wow! And somebody thinks this is great! This is gonna do really well!” And it becomes a self-fulfilling thing that they do better because they think that they’re going to do better because somebody who they thought is smarter than them, even though I’m not, thinks that it’s going to do better. And this whole thing about putting your opinions on somebody else or just taking other people’s opinions as meaning more than your own, it’s just kind of like, don’t forget, it’s like, you know what’s best for you.

Derek Sivers Take advice from everywhere. Read books, read marketing books, go down to the bookstore and go to the marketing section, read everything by Seth Godin, read everything that says guerrilla marketing, whatever, in the title, read everything, take everybody’s advice, but in the end it’s just like only you know what’s best for you.