Buying Up Baby

Philly-area Disc Makers acquired Portland's CD Baby. How come?

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Sep 10, 2008

Mark Stehle CD UNDERBELLY: "In one fell swoop we're probably the biggest digital music aggregator in the country," says Disc Makers' Tony van Veen. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

After touring with a circus for 10 years, Derek Sivers decided to start one of his own. In 1998, the full-time musician figured out how to accept credit cards on his Woodstock, N.Y.-based Web site and sell his CDs.

When friends asked if he'd sell their CDs too, he did. Soon more bands were brought into the fold. He changed the site's name to CD Baby and created an independent music monster. First on CD, then through digital download/online services, CD Baby — now based in Portland — let independent artists sell directly to consumers and get a check every week. The fee to join was low. The membership was democratic. If you didn't sell — unlike major labels — you remained part of the CD Baby community.

And by 2008, some 247,282 acts were selling at CD Baby (cdbaby.com) with 4,667,510 CDs sold online to customers and $84,663,884 paid directly to the artists.

CD Baby artists still sell big numbers and the company still operates as it always has. The only change is that as of August, CD Baby is owned by Disc Makers, the 62-year-old Pennsauken, N.J.-based independent manufacturer of CDs and DVDs, with 10 locations nationwide.

Area artists as diverse as Akron/Family, CKY, Dr. Dog, Digs Darklighter, Amy Pickard, Mico Nonet, Jimmy Bruno and Melody Gardot have long been CD Baby babies.

"Honestly, CD Baby has been the steadiest, most reliable store I've sold at as an independent artist," says Gardot. Before she became a Verve label artist, Gardot distributed her homemade Some Lessons (2005) and Worrisome Heart (2006) on CD Baby. Still does. "The checks that come weekly still help when I have to go grocery shopping, when I find that extra bit of cash sitting in my pocket," says Gardot.

CD Baby and Disc Makers are no strangers. They've been partnered in more than a few deals for the last seven years and the president of each company — Sivers and Havertown's Tony van Veen — are pals. But it's only within the last year that van Veen, 43, began to whisper sweet nothings into Sivers' ear about buying the Baby.

"As a CD manufacturer, partnering with a company that made it easy for artists to sell more CDs worldwide, [joining forces] was a total no-brainer," says van Veen while on a train en route to Boston. [Sivers was unavailable for comment.]

Disc Makers is a company that manufactures about 40 million CDs a year, duplicates CDs and DVDs, and produces custom merchandise and graphic design for promotional printing. In other words, it gets all the residual benefits of the music industry without bothering with the sticky business of selling and promoting music. Why would a company like this go further into the music biz at what some are calling its lowest point?

There are big money reasons, of course.

"We already made the CDs, now we have a hand in selling them as well," says van Veen. "In one fell swoop we're probably the biggest digital music aggregator in the country, possibly the world, with 2 million songs under management that are syndicated to more than 100 download sellers." That includes Amazon MP3, Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, and iTunes, the latter of which was responsible for about half the $25 million CD Baby distributed to artists in 2007. Then there's branding. Van Veen believes CD Baby is the single strongest brand in independent music. "Unless you consider MySpace an independent music brand, which I don't," he notes. "Combining the power of that brand [CD Baby] with the power of Disc Makers — another of the strongest brands in independent music — creates an incredibly strong music services company."

Van Veen feels that both companies have the same demographic base: artists looking to be independent and sell independently.

"There's a community of people who go to CD Baby to look for new and upcoming artists because they know it's reliable and unique — like getting the tear sheets to Vogue before the fattest issue of the year arrives," says Gardot, who put 1,000 copies of her Some Lessons EP ("pressed by Disc Makers and not for the first time") onto CD Baby in 2005 only to find interested indie aficionados. "People dig that. And on the other side of the coin, there's a community for the musicians on CD Baby in the forums and e-mails they send out."

Beyond business, there's something personal in this purchase for van Veen. Disc Makers' own tight-knit operation, barely 500 employees strong, resembles CD Baby in van Veen's mind. "That was us 15 years ago with the employees in tattoos, piercings and dyed-blue hair."

He was one of them in the long-ago. After van Veen got out of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 he got a job at Disc Makers. He also played drums and sang in several Philly hardcore bands, the most notable of which was Homo Picnic, in which he performed as "Tony Tigre." They gigged with Dead Milkmen and Sadistic Exploits and released a 1987 album, Days of Grey, pressed at Disc Makers. The hardcore DIY ethos ("Write your own damn songs, record your own damn music, release your own damn record, book your own damn tour," laughs van Veen) formed the backbone of van Veen's business philosophy. In his recent note to CD Baby's dot org Web community (cdbaby.org), this "proud papa" pledged to continue what Sivers had started — to keep the Baby independent, democratic, accepting of all comers and conscious of its commitments, ethical and financial.

"CD Baby's always been an awesome company with tremendous Internet presence," says Neil Drucker. And Drucker knows from DIY. His Record Cellar label was a hub for local power pop and Americana bands like Flight of Mavis and Rolling Hayseeds. And though the label is now shuttered, its artists live on courtesy of CD Baby. "They make it easy for potential customers to find you, to hear your songs and to purchase your music. But the best thing about CD Baby from the viewpoint of the record label is that they actually pay you on a timely basis for everything they sell. Go figure."

"It's one of the reasons why Disc Makers is so focused on indie artists," says van Veen. "I was one of those kids. Without sounding corny, the mission of CD Baby and Disc Makers is to make the little guy look good and help him make a living. We're fighting for the underdog every day. We know it's a long hard slog and the possibilities of success are small. We just try to maximize it."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

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