CD Baby going globetrotting this year
The single, overarching goal for CD Baby this year is expanding its web site to enable shoppers from numerous countries to more easily purchase goods.
“It seems very short-sighted to make a web site English-only. I’ll never do it again. Honestly, it’s one of my biggest regrets,” says Derek Sivers, president and programmer. “The only reason CD Baby was English-only in the first place is because it was just a little hobby web site that I didn’t think would take off.”
CD Baby sells CDs from almost 126,000 independent musicians. The company defines independent as “not having sold one’s life, career and creative works to a corporation.” Since the site launched in 1998, about 30% of all orders are shipped overseas, Sivers reports. Last year the company, No. 324 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, did $12.1 million in sales, up 39% from 2004’s $8.7 million.
The music e-retailer has been preparing its back-end systems to handle Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese. It just sent all English content to professional translators. No official launch date has been announced.
“For all future projects I ever do, they’re going to be multilingual from Day One,” Sivers adds. “It’s the considerate thing to do. It’s a big world out there.”
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