It's unbelievable that this company, in the midst of this crisis, would let more than 72 hours pass without comment from the head honchos. So the tension builds up on the forum (the only part of the website that seems to work without glitches), rumors fly, and artists begin to attack each other.
When management is silent, speculation fills the information vacuum.
As some one pointed out, no doubt tongue in cheek, they have "three people" working round the clock to answer a "handful" of "axe grinders and whiners."
I've got to hand it to the frontline. They are performing well! But upstairs? We hear nothing but recaps that there will be "no rollback." Fine. But what of the medium to long term outlook?
Are heads beginning to roll over there? Is it a "palace coup"? Or is it true that these guys take three day weekends in Aruba, even in a shit storm such as this.
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So, today is Payday and CD Baby says it paid out $1,400,000. Which would we rather have, the money or words from Brian? Golly, what a tough choice.
ReplyDeleteIf they've paid $1.4 million today, that's good news. But I saw somewhere that they're paying on Tuesday. Isn't that a day (usually) late?
ReplyDeletelook at topic below where people acknowledged payments----maybe comment came from Japan where today is tomorrow
ReplyDeleteI thought the silence was weird too, but then I got to thinking about it. The front line staff are obviously under enormous pressure and are at this point starting to fall apart, if you're seen some of the recent part-gibberish responses on the message board over the last day or so. They're probably being kept there all hours and run into the ground.
ReplyDeleteThey would probably love to apologise to us, but have been silenced.
I believe what management fears is that if a CD Baby employee apologises formally for anything, it is an admission of guilt. They fear being sued. That's the only reasonable explanation for it, in my opinion.
They probably don't know any better than we do if they'll be able to pull through this or not, so are now in damage control mode, and keeping really quiet about the situation. If they can fix enough stuff in a few days to prevent anybody else getting upset, they can sweep most of the mess under the carpet. If they can't fix it, then it doesn't matter anyway.
I suspect that it was similar reasoning which led them to go ahead with the re-launch without properly informing artists and customers of what was going on (the maybe nobody will notice mentality).
Trouble with that sort of thinking is it is all a gamble, and so far they are on a losing streak.
I predict that one of two things will happen, or some combination of the two:
1. Somebody becomes the scapegoat and resigns. Things appear to get better for a while, but will never be like they were before because of the new corporate bosses.
2. It really is all too much and ends up putting them out of business eventually. Eventually, because they make enough money that they'll hang on for a while even with a mass-exodus (which would take a lot of time anyway, and for some having albums vanish from iTunes for months at a time during a distribution switch is simply too much hassle and lost income).
I just realized that the "download sales history" option is now gone.
ReplyDeleteThis means you can't get all your sales from CDBaby and you can't get the full contact info of your purchasers. I wish they'd let us know this was going away so we could have archived our histories. This seems pretty serious to take away.
They say that the listings in the sub-genres will be by units sold and the pages should represent the top albums of that month. I wrote down the top twenty in my sub-genre and will compare it to next moths listings. I don't have a lot a faith in this process.
ReplyDelete