JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

Michael,

There's a lot of problems with trying to be all things to all people. First of all, my concept is to find people we can truly stand behind and put our reputation behind. The wider that net is cast, the more likely someone untrustworthy or thoroughly vetted will sneak through. Once a few scam artists or simply incompetent companies slip through the entire thing crumbles.

There really no impact on free market with this either. We're neither stopping nor controlling who people use for their services. What we ARE doing is saying "here's an honest, quality, fairly priced option for this service from someone we trust" and then you can use that as a basis. Will other companies offer better deals? I am sure they will. Price is not a major factor on who we would partner with. Sure, we would require someone to be competitive, but probably would avoid simply finding the cheapest option. Sure, some companies still offer the best service/options for the lowest prices, CD Baby being a perfect example. But Companies like Disc Makers offer the most reliable and diverse and in my opinion the best complete service option of any company out there, but they will rarely be the cheapest. So if price alone is the only concern of someone, they will almost always find another option..but with that they'll take risks and be on their own to get them to deliver on time and in the quality they need. If we make the project too broad, it will be impossible.

On top of that, I've sent business to companies for 8 years in gigantic numbers. In every case except the people mentioned above, we've never gotten anything in return. We've also never charged members. But with our growth, the music awards will be literally impossible to do again without significantly more income coming into JPF. We've done tons of studies and carefully watched others fail who tried to convert to membership fees or who charged for their awards and flopped. (In a similar case, a company (a well known and respected one at that) doing a music awards tried to partner with CD Baby in the same way we partner but had a fee attached. The offer was sent to 130,000 CD Baby artists and only 400 were interested. Our awards were offered to 45,000 (people who had joined only in the previous time period) and 23,000 wanted to participate. That's a night and day difference.. meaning charging to enter the awards isn't going to work and frankly is not something we wanted to do anyway. On top of that, the cost to CD Baby to do our awards with us is gigantic. We're talking SERIOUS money they spend to pull those CD's and ship them alphabetically to us. Without that process, we couldn't possibly deal with the quantity of music we got, but without the quantity, the process would be far less meaningful and the diversity would suffer a great deal. That means less positive attention to indie music and less quality among the categories we could retain meaning industry and media care far less. So no fee is going to happen for the awards. So, no member fee, no awards fee.. we need money.

These partnerships might cover at least part of that needed income. But if we deal with a large number, none of the partners are very happy, we can't possibly monitor the business we might be sending (I've been screwed before by people who said they'd share income but never did because we couldn't prove where it came from) and so on. So we need 1 or 2 key featured partners to work with. If someone doesn't like our partners, no one is forcing them to work with us. On the other hand, if a partner does well with us, it's all the more motivation to keep us and our members happy and thus we can have even more influence on how they do business, what their pricing is and how they resolve problems. Remember, even 100% honest companies get complaints and often customers are in the wrong and are unreasonable. Tight partnerships can deal with that type of thing. A bunch of lose partnerships would turn quickly into chaos.

Plus, little guys often can't handle the quantity of business. BUT.. we've proven over and over that we're happy to work with a little guy if they are honest and doing a great job. I've never seen any of these new digital sites that are even in the ballpark of CD Baby. Sure many PROMISE to be.. but none have delivered yet. And no one is stopping anyone from using them instead of CD Baby. There's no exclusivity. There's only our ability to offer our members a trusted option with fair pricing and service for their money.

The free market is also responsible for creating a rich fishing ground for scam artists. Part of the free market is affiliations and alliances with compatible partners. We're simply interested in created a free market way for companies to be vetted, to get additional business referrals and if both parties are happy, a share in the profit so we can continue to do all this free work. Sounds fair and honest to me. And I prefer that over a forced member fee, a forced entry fee for the awards, fees to play at showcases or go to chapter events and so on. If it's all voluntary and we put the scam artists out of business, everyone wins.

Brian

[This message has been edited by Brian Austin Whitney (edited 05-16-2006).]