But what does it mean? I think he's obviously a loyal CD Baby employee who, even if the executive suite doesn't have a clue, is still committed to the "core values" of the old CD Baby which he referred to here a couple months back. His may be a voice in the wilderness, however.
That Pony is meeting with the bigshots at Discmakers is perhaps encouraging--possibly the dupe giant crunched some numbers and noticed "consequences" to its bottom line? After all, one of the recently unveiled "new" services since the bungled launch is an instant duplication service. Certainly I would be hesitant to use anything associated with the new Baby until we can see where the chips fall. So with CD sales absolutely flat since Derek sold out ("bought in"?) in 2008, who would want to stock the Portland warehouse with more?
It's very difficult in this era to remain uncynical about the bigger fish in the capitalist pond. Maybe I'm better off investing in shares of Corinthian Capital because I sense that CD Baby eventually will turn around and start making big bucks again--by screwing its massive artist base!
So until we see results of the kind Pony has urged us to continue waiting for, realistically I don't feel all that encouraged.
Eight weeks ago I dropped a comment at cdbaby.org pointing out that for a technophobe like me, it was a helluva lot easier to build this blog than it was to navigate around the "improved" CD Baby website. I appealed to executives to hire someone to read Jeff Jarvis's book What Would Google Do? (check out his blog BuzzMachine.Com, linked here under "other resources"). Or, failing that, call Google and ask them to send an EMT unit to Portland immediately!
I still feel the same way because this new website is so unfriendly and unnavigable as to be virtually useless to me. CD Baby needs to take some lessons from Google. And I think heads need to roll as well. Whether it's a totally new management team or a new tech team supervised by consultants from Google, how 'bout hiring some new faces upstairs and show us that you're serious about relaunching this awful relaunch?
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