You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music Highlight

Even more crucially, though, CD Baby gave you a way to sell your music. CD Baby was both a licensor and an online store, and thus they opened the retail ecosystem to more bands by expanding its scope. This was valuable in itself, but maybe even more valuable as precedent. CD Baby built a catalog of independent artists large enough that by the time the iTunes Store came around in 2003, Apple and the other early digital-download stores all needed it to keep catalog-size parity with each other. CD Baby founder Derek Sivers has called this the most important moment in the history of independent music, and from there we can trace a straightforward lineage to TuneCore and DistroKid and the now-fairly-well-established idea that basically anybody can get their songs on all streaming music services, and thus the joyful human idea of having all the world’s music in one place.