Indie Resources: CD Baby & GarageBand

The LA Weekly has an interview with the founder of CD Baby, a service designed to help independent musicians distribute their music. Derek Sivers tells the story of how he got into it when he found that back in the late 90s even many online music stores were resistant to anybody that wasn’t working through an established distributor while distributors weren’t responsive to independent musicians trying to establish a base. CD Baby helped change that situation and they also help with getting music on Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

I was led to this interview via the BlogAds blog whose author Henry Copeland also found the following quote of interest:
“Like right now, I meet lots of 30-something musicians, who maybe spent their teens and 20s wanting to be a rock star, and now are kind of starting to think, “Well, maybe I can make a good living just putting out my music directly and doing it on my own.” But they kind of had to fall over to that way of thinking. What I think will be really interesting is, imagine being a 13-year-old musician right now, growing up surrounded by this mentality of “f*ck the label, the label sucks, indie is cool, go direct, never sign over your rights to somebody else”! Imagine growing up in that mentality, and what that’s going to look like in 10 years!”

This is especially interesting given that, for the most part, record labels take the rights to musicians’ music and their labor becomes work for hire. They get various deals based on what it makes, but they lose control of the music. That’s what sets up situations where a musician has an album recorded but it’s not getting released or it doesn’t get released until it’s really kind of out of date. Numerous musicians have had their careers ruined that way before they really got a chance to see how far they could go.

Another interesting resource for indies is GarageBand, and I’m talking about independent musicians here, not indie labels which can be fairly large and can also f*ck artists over, though they can also be very cool. In any case, Inside Digital Media has an extended interview with GarageBand CEO Ali Partovi that should be worth checking out. Just a quick glance at the GarageBand site reveals that they’ve also added a Podcast Studio that looks kind of cool.