atduskgreg

I  purchase quite a bit of music but I don’t buy many CDs since the iTunes Store and other digital sources made it easy to get just about anything, just about any time in a nearly frictionless environment. When I do buy a CD, it’s likely to be from one of two sources:

• Lou’s Records—my favorite music store for a quarter of a century and worth a trip to Encinitas, California on Highway 101 to browse Lou’s amazing stock of gently-used CDs and vinyl recordings—or,
• CD Baby—the online store where I had a truly remarkable experience with my first purchase.

I’d read about CD Baby, but I went there when I learned they carried music from the singer/songwriter Kendall Payne—one of the growing number of independent artists making a go of it without major label support (and, full disclosure, a friend and occasional collaborator). After a brief and frustrating engagement with a major label when she was a teenager, Ms. Payne launched her next project through CD Baby. She loved the experience.

As I understand the system, the artist sets a price for the product she delivers to CD Baby—it could be $4 or $40—CD Baby adds a modest service charge and that’s what it costs the customer. The artist provides finished product which CD Baby stocks, sells and ships; the company take their cut and sends the rest to the musician. Everybody’s happy.

CD Baby was the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Derek Sivers, who loves music and musicians (and who unexpectedly and creatively disposed of the company in 2008). Mr. Sivers has a reputation for doing the unexpected and creative. The day after my Kendall Payne CD arrived I got an email over his signature:

Jim -

Did you get your CD OK? Was everything perfect?

If you liked a CD you bought, please write a little review on the musician’s CD Baby page? Just click the link below, and scroll to the bottom of the page. You’ll see where it says, “WRITE A REVIEW”. It only takes a minute and would mean a lot to the artists.

The CD we sent you was: KENDALL PAYNE: Grown

GO TO: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/kpayne

Also… if you like that CD, I think you’ll like some of our editor’s picks, here:

GOSPEL: Contemporary Gospel

http://www.cdbaby.com/style/147

POP: Folky Pop

http://www.cdbaby.com/style/133

Of course if anything was wrong, please let me know! Tell me it was

ORDER # 604500. I’d be glad to help.

Thanks!

---

Derek Sivers, CD Babyhttp://cdbaby.com <– new CDs added every day!

email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com

So simple. So timely. So inexpensive. I forwarded the email to marketing friends whose company shipped a lot of product in the $10 – $50 range. My note said: benchmark this baby.

Here’s where the story takes an unexpected turn: The message that came back from one of my friends said:

just makes me want to cry. I need to get to where things like this inspire/empower me; instead they paralyze me.

How depressing. Here was a very competent, well-paid manager in a solid business who couldn’t imagine a way to communicate with paying customers to ask if they got what they paid for and invite them to spend again. My friend’s product line was fine but the complete disconnect between order-taking, billing, fulfillment and marketing—and the underlying leadership failure—neutralized creativity and innovation (and I think cost the company more market share than the competition was capable of taking on merit alone).

Could things be any more broken?

Jesus drew a spiritual parable from winemaking and textiles. I’m going to ignore the spiritual lesson for the moment and isolate the purely practical insight:

“No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old.  And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.  No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.”
— Luke 5:36-38

New products tend to break old systems—and may be ruined themselves in the process. When a business practice is so broken that talented managers are incapacitated, isn’t it time to break it the rest of the way and replace it with something that works?

Who can possibly afford to pay managers to sit around paralyzed by their inability to launch the simplest initiative to increase revenues and deepen customer relationships?

Apparently, many of us can—or at least many of us thought we could when business was strong enough to prop up underperforming systems in hopes they would sort themselves out. But that’s not generally how that works, is it… Generally, systems must be sorted out by people. Because it’s people, not companies or systems, who are made in God’s image.

In The Big Moo, one of Seth Godin’s Group of 33 wrote:

The only reason the system exists is so that you can make the things you make, right? So if the system is demeaning your work, change the system.

Here’s a bet. I bet there’s someone in your company who is surprised—maybe even frustrated—that you’re not doing something very simple to increase revenues and deepen customer relationships. And I bet she or he has an idea about how to implement that simple thing in the next 30 days for very little money. And I bet all you have to do is ask.