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What would a CDBaby2.0 look like?

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Just curious if anyone has opinions on how CDBaby works nowadays. Brian Felsen, the president of CDBaby, talks about how there's no magic bullet for artists to promote their work -- and it's not easy to just "be great" and be discovered. So CDBaby tries to provide services to artists in a fair way and to help build a community around fans and distribute music as widely as possible.

If CDBaby is what the next generation of music labels should be like, what should the next version of CDBaby look like?

 

initiated Feb 23, 2012 in Startups by Michael Ho (2,370 points)   10 14 27
   

2 Responses

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As far as I'm concerned, filtering and curation are the big issues of the day.
 
We have this abundance of media, but no way to cut through it all and find what sounds good to us.  Getting this in place seems to be the common missing link among all self-publishing services.  
 
Right now, I make it, I post it, I wait, and not much happens.  That's not a system. That's half of a system.
 
Published "artist spotlights" for the real stand-outs would be helpful, as peer-approval can be an important factor.  It's hard to have "cool taste in music" if even your best friends in high school have never heard of any of the bands on your media player. The old gate-keepers did a good job of pushing a small number of bands on everyone.
 
As someone who has grown up and worked with musicians my whole life, I do believe I have developed a good ability to distinguish between what is good, and what is to my personal taste.  I know a lot of bands that I do not like, but I am still able to sit back and recognize that they are good. Likewise, there are bands that I quite enjoy, and I can sit back and see that they aren't very good.  Taste and skill are separate beasts, and any system of presenting music to the world must take both into account.
 
The problem, of course, is the glut of new material constantly being released makes human curation unfeasible. It has to be either crowd-sourced or automatically analyzed and sorted by algorithms.
 
 
I would propose a combination of Reddit and Pandora, (with a bit of flattr thrown in for good measure).  Let fans tag, upvote, and downvote everything.  But don't rely on popularity alone.  Like Pandora, my own preferences should be taken into account, acting as multipliers for the crowd-sourced numbers. The crowd may not love industrial, but if my voting history suggests that I do, it's numbers should be inflated on my end.  But even if a song exists outside of my own bubble of personal taste, if it is popular enough, there might really be something there, and it should be visible to me. 
 
And if I really like a song, there should be a super-convenient tip jar for me to throw in a few cents.  And the flattr model of having a pre-paid digital purse bypasses the barrier of having to reach into my pocked and pull out a credit card every damn time.
 
That's the best system I can imagine right now.  Take what works elsewhere and throw it all together.
response added Feb 27, 2012 by Kyle Clements (2,460 points)   3 9 17
@kyle_clements - I like your Reddit Pandora Flattr combo. Maybe someday we'll have a StarTrek-like system where we can just say: "Computer, I'm in the mood for some relaxing and upbeat music that's got some acoustical guitars in it."  :P
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Hmm, not yet signed up to CDbaby. I need to in order to get my stuff on spotify, but i don't know a great deal about it really. The one thing I would say is that it will need to expand from mp3s and CDs and possibly become a facilitator to allow artists to sell other things to fans. I suspect some kind of kick-starter type functionality (or a partnership therewith) might be useful too.
response added Feb 24, 2012 by drew stephenson (3,370 points)   3 10 22

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