I love this guy! He has a good way with words.
Do I sense the pressure's on (CD Baby) in the blogosphere?
Posts
How they have failed us
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It is as if the editorial department at The Washington Post woke up one
morning asking, in headlines I will quote below, “What are we doing wrong?”
I wil...
3 days ago
CDbaby begun to censor the forum posts!!!
ReplyDeleteThis IS alarming.
All the fresh posts from the thread
CD Baby Update: Hits Counter Returns!
that enquire about payments HAVE BEEN DELETED!!!
Does anyone else know if this is true? It would be helpful if this can be confirmed or otherwise verified.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much confusion over at cdbaby.org that I don't even bother much with it anymore. I'm keeping only half an eye out, watching mainly for Felsen's "weekly" update--which never arrived this week. No big news there.
I know this much, however: something's badly wrong with sales because the anectdotal evidence indicates that sales of both CDs and iTunes have plummeted compared to summer of 2008.
It's yet another in a long list of points to piss off the CD Baby artist because back in July someone from the company said (I'm paraphrasing): "We decided to unveil the launch in summer because for most artists sales tend to slow in summer."
I had no evidence for it at the time, but it always sounded to me like a line of bullshit.
This is pure speculation on my part, but is it possible that summer sales for CD Baby's "big" artists go down while for the vast majority of the "long-tail" they remain steady or even increase some? Call me paranoid, but "bigshot capitalists" are always gonna prefer the "bigshot artists" 'cos that's where the profits are. The rest of us proles can go take a hike!
Brian K at CD Baby says comments at the forum have not been deleted manually, but that anti-spam tools may be doing so.
ReplyDeleteHe advises: "check for words that the site might think would appear in a medication, etc. or any spam type email."
Somebody is lying. The deleted thread about payments has been started by a person signed as Alicia Grugett. I checked her out. The lady seems to be very nice - after all she is an opera singer. Anybody can sign under any name, but there were no problematic words in this thread.
ReplyDeletecould "opera" be a dirty word?
ReplyDeletesadly, sales and hits appear to be much, much lower for many artists
search formula/functions aren't working properly - as folks have noted, and the "sounds like" and other trails that once led visitors to discover new music on the CD Baby site don;t do that anymore
harder to understand the drop in sales from digital distribution partners - but, hopefully, time reveals all...
The CD baby artists have become passive. It appears that Brian Felsen can get away with anything.
ReplyDelete