Cultivate’s Blog - Thoughts on employee development

Derek Sivers is the founder of a website called CDbaby.com - a site to purchase music from independent musicians.  He has an interesting post on his blog about whether musicians should bother producing a hard-copy CD, or just go completely digital (the short story is that they should absolutely produce a CD.)

To make his point even clearer he ends with a great story about his visit with Apple to talk about getting some of the CDBaby material better placement on iTunes.  Here’s the story…

When visiting Apple iTunes, I had lunch with the guy who’s in charge of independent music editorial - the one who chooses who gets featured placement.

I asked him, “What’s the best way for me to turn you on to something I think you’ll love?”

His answer? “Send me the CD.”

I said, “Uh.. really? What if it’s already on iTunes? Shouldn’t I just send you the link?”

He said, “Yeah. I commute an hour each way to Apple’s office. I do all my real listening in the car, so I need the CD.”

(The whole post is here:  http://sivers.org/dd-only )

That’s exactly what we’ve found with Cultivate - the majority of people listen in their car, and in those cases the CD is usually easier to deal with than an ipod.  In our case CD’s let you reach everyone in your organization.