Over at digital music store CDBaby they have been making a lot of changes recently. Since the sale of the company the site itself has been going through a lot of changes. A while ago CDBaby announced to their community that they will be updating their website which is long overdue and here are early pictures of what it is going to look like.
Disclosure: Im CEO of Insomnia which owns and operates RouteNote a digital music distributor.
A couple of months ago CD Baby, one of the largest online sellers of music for indie bands, was acquired by Disc Makers. At that time the price was not disclosed, but now the founder Derek Sivers has disclosed to VentureVoice that the sale price was $22 million. Sivers owned 100 percent of the company he founded in 1998.
A lot of people are talking about a good winfall for Sivers, but Im really too sure what numbers they are looking at. Cd Baby published a report stating their sales from January to July 07, which made up of $21m in revenues, thus by the end of the year Im sure they would have around $50m in revenues. From what I have seen of web based enterprise acquisitions lately, they are normally around 5x revenues, thus placing Cd Baby around the $250m mark. Therefore selling at $22m is just a crazy cheap price and not a winfall!
I havent been onto CDBaby.com for a while and I just noticed it has a new look. Has this been on there for long?
The site itself is very clear and quite basic (the same as every other CDBaby site) and compared to the old CDBaby.com site it is easier to navigate and actually find what you are looking for. However, I have noticed that the key baby logo has gone.. bring back the baby!
I have just read an article this morning on News.com, which outlines that Snocap has axed about 60% of its workforce. It is also reported that Snocap might be for sale and that Snocap has received interest from several companies. It looks like there might have been more than meets the eye with the termination last week of CDBaby from their Snocap partnership.
This is not the best new for one of the companies within our group, RouteNote. Snocap is a founding partner with our new service that will launching in the coming months.
I have been reading various articles this week about CDBaby and how they broke their deal with Snocap. I have actually seen all of the CDBaby figures on how much their artist were selling on Snocap and the figures weren’t too bad. However if you are a music aggregator and trying to work with Snocap it is a little more difficult than just providing distribution to online stores. The issues with Snocap is the amount of time it takes to implement a widget store and which songs will need to be selected.
CDBaby is now offering for their artists to sign up with Snocap individually and receive the first year free. If however this doesn’t work for you then make sure you head over to RouteNote which will be launching in a few months and already has Snocap signed as a founding partner. RouteNote will also not charge any signup fees and can license your music for TV, Radio and Advertising at the same time.
