Make a dream come true
Selling my friends’ CDs was starting to take up a lot of my time. I realized I had accidentally started a business. But I didn’t want to start a business! I was already living my dream life as a full-time musician. I didn’t want anything to distract me from that.
So, I thought that by taking an unrealistically utopian approach, I could keep the business from growing too much. Instead of trying to make it big, I was going to make it small. It was the opposite of ambition, so I had to think in a way that was the opposite of ambitious.
I wrote down my utopian dream-come-true distribution deal from my musician’s point of view. In a perfect world, my distributor would...
- Pay me every week.
- Show me the full name and address of everyone who bought my CD. (Because those are my fans, not the distributor’s.)
- Never kick me out for not selling enough. (Even if I sell only one CD every five years, it’ll be there for someone to buy.)
- Never allow paid placement. (Because it’s not fair to those who can’t afford it.)
That’s it! That was my mission. I liked it. It was a worthy hobby. I named it CD Baby, and put my friends’ CDs there.
Those four points were like a mission statement. I wrote them on the site, talked about them at every conference, and made sure everyone I worked with knew them.
The key point is that I wasn’t trying to make a big business. I was just daydreaming about how one little thing would look in a perfect world.
When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.
When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it’ll be a dream come true for someone else, too.
"The key point is that I wasn’t trying to make a big business. I was just daydreaming about how one little thing would look in a perfect world.
When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia."
I love this - you've got a very gifting, generous perspective on business and the world. Using it as a tool to create worlds, form experience and impact lives through a system that's plugged into and leverages some of the most fundamental machinery that connects our world - money & value.
For my public speaking club speeches, at Toastmasters International (worldwide) I don't spend more than a week in composing and rehearsing. No point in trying for longer in a silly effort to worry about being perfect.
I am not being paid, and a weekly creation cycle feels OK. (Although I would never do speeches two weeks in a row—let others do speeches too)
My rule for blog essays, too, is only to compose, edit and polish for just one week. Again, no point in trying too hard, or making it into a chore. A week is enough to learn lessons for improvement; blogs are for fun.
Even when I retire and have oodles of time, one week per project will be my utopia.
Designing my business from a student’s perspective is something I’ve not considered… always a poke in the brain from you.
Thank you for that Derek.
Jordan
Hi Derek, too bad CD Baby dumped so many of your ideas under the new owners. It's just a clearing house for music streaming platforms now that were devised to make tech geeks rich at the expense of musicians, it seems. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Steve DiLauro
Hi Derek itz always good to hear from you.I wenty through enough motions enough to see if it was really for although I never even came close to a hit record but thanks to you I did get a chance to see what it was like to sell a corner of a cd Lol but know I don't want no parts of the bussiness like that the fame and all but you Derek you helped some of us see some things that's all I have to say
I'm happy for you D
Hi there Derek,
I like your statement: "When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it’ll be a dream come true for someone else, too."
With that, I think, the "perfect world" is key.
If we all in this world were actually (literally) brothers and sisters, we would do business, but in addition, we would also love and truly care for our customers.
So yes, as one's "utopian-dream" comes true, it will lead to others' dreams to come true.
Unfortunately, the established economic/monetary systems and established way of thinking, won't allow much room for that. But, the ones that can make a change, should make a change. Fortunately, the people who truly care will make a change.
I can see what you mean. I personally saw some people's dreams come true, as a consequence of other people's dreams coming true.
Great thoughts.
Thanks for sharing.
CD Baby was wonderful when you were running it! The third of your principles listed above: "Never kick me out for not selling enough. (Even if I sell only one CD every five years, it’ll be there for someone to buy.)” has effectively been abandoned. Some of my older CDs, of which CD Baby had one copy in stock, were returned to me at my expense (my other choice was to give CD Baby permission to scrap them). So CD Baby now has zero copies of those CDs in stock. The next time somebody orders one of them, I have to mail that single copy to CD Baby from the UK - with the latest rises in postage charges, a prohibitive cost. Luckily, I’m able to sell lots of CDs from my own website and on gigs. It is, however, sad to see CD Baby pushing people out in this way.