CD Baby, Inc. is an online distributor of independent music. The company was described as an "anti-label" by its parent company's Chief Operating Officer
Tracy Maddux
Tracy Maddux is Chief Commercial Officer of Downtown Music Holdings, the parent company of AVL Digital Group which included CD Baby and a suite of other promotional services and tools for musical artists. These include AdRev (monetization for co ...
.
The CD Baby music store was shut down in March 2020 with a statement that "CD Baby retired our music store in March of 2020 in order to place our focus entirely on the tools and services that are most meaningful to musicians today and tomorrow."
In 2019, CD Baby was the only digital aggregator with top preferred partner status with both
Spotify
Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...
and
Apple Music
Apple Music is a music, audio and video streaming service developed by Apple Inc. Users select music to stream to their device on-demand, or they can listen to existing playlists. The service also includes the Internet radio stations Apple M ...
,
and it was home to more than 650,000 artists and nine million tracks that were made available to over 100 digital services and platforms around the globe as of May 2019.
The firm, as of 2018, operated out of
Portland, Oregon
Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous co ...
, with offices in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
and
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
.
History
CD Baby was founded in 1998 by Derek Sivers during the dot-com craze.
In 2000, the firm moved to Portland, Oregon, where they remain headquartered today. In 2004, CD Baby began offering a digital music distribution and became an early partner of iTunes.
In August 2008 Disc Makers, a CD and DVD manufacturer, announced that they had bought CD Baby (and Host Baby) for 22 million dollars following a 7-year partnership between the two companies.
In 2013, CD Baby Pro Publishing was launched as an add-on that assists independent songwriters in administering their composition rights and collecting global publishing royalties. The service is now available to songwriters in more than 70 countries and territories.
In March 2019, Disc Makers sold CD Baby (as part of the AVL Digital Group) to
Downtown for $200 million. AVL's physical product divisions, Disc Makers, BookBaby, and Merchly, were acquired in a separate transaction by the Disc Makers executive team as part of the newly formed DIY Media Group.
On March 31, 2020, CD Baby ceased its retail sales.
Services
The company also hosts two annual conferences for independent musicians looking for education, networking, and performance opportunities. Described as "the only music conference geared specifically towards the needs of independent artists in charge of their careers", the DIY Musician Conference took place in Chicago in 2015 and 2016, Nashville in 2017 and 2018, and is scheduled in Austin for 2019 and 2020.
In 2018, CD Baby paid over $100 million
to its artist community (a 25% increase from 2017), bringing its total artist payouts to over $700 million. In addition to the services the firm offers under its own name, CD Baby also now owns and operates HearNow, Show.co, Illustrated Sound Network, and HostBaby. HostBaby closed in 2019.
See also
*
List of companies based in Oregon
*
ONErpm
ONErpm (ONE Revolution People's Music) is a digital distribution service and fan engagement platform founded in 2010 by Emmanuel Zunz and Matthew Olim, the latter one of the co-founders of CDNow, a pioneer in digital music. The company offers su ...
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
1998 establishments in New York (state)
American companies established in 1998
Companies based in Portland, Oregon
Online music stores of the United States