Monday, February 20, 2017

CDBaby has been offline for over 85 hours

I  use CDBaby.com for most of my online sales and distribution. Their website has been offline since before Friday, February 17th at 10am when I first noticed it was down for maintenance. Every week I download my sales reports and streaming info so I can keep track of royalties that I owe and that are owed to me. It's how I pay my rent. This week I get a maintenance pop-up. It's happened before in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep and decided to check when my ...mind drifted and I was curious which of my Christmas songs was getting the most Spotify play that month.

Back to 2017... On Friday I - along with what I assume were many others - were told it was routine maintenance and it would be back up soon (exact wording: ASAP). On Saturday we were told it was taking longer than expected. On Sunday we were told a database issue occurred but it will be fixed by tomorrow. On Monday we were told it would be up in 3 hours. It is now almost Tuesday and we are back to routine maintenance is taking longer than expected and it will be up ASAP.

Like other full-time musicians I have scheduled and targeted e-mail blasts, radio promotional spots, paid for ads in print media that utilize a QR code to point to online retail, internet ads and much more that all must be now cancelled (if possible) or altered to now point to alternative retail outlets. It's not impossible but it's something I could have spent Saturday and Sunday and Monday doing instead of sitting in a limbo being told to "give it a few".

Come on, CDBABY... WTactualF?! I have paid you flat rates for your services and turned over a percentage of what I have made in royalties and sales for 10 years. All that adds up to a pretty nice chuck of change that I fork over. I need some transparency from you here. If something got fucked up just relay that info to us. Things gets fucked up all the time! It's life. I would gladly accept being told that something got royally fucked up. But passing something off as nothing but routine when in actuality it is significant and may result in loss of business for the thousands who use you as a subcontractor for music distribution in both physical and digital product is a BIG DEAL.

Thank you. I never rant and I think I got it out of my system.

But, seriously, you better have an easy out for those of us who want out if this doesn't get fixed in the next 24 hours.

To those of you who have tried to purchase music: I am truly sorry. I have responded to those of your who have emailed me and hopefully my offer for an email of mp3s or a snail-mailed CD will suffice.