For a full bio, check out Derek’s about page. The top highlight:
Me in 10 seconds:
I’ve been a musician, producer, circus performer, entrepreneur, TED speaker, and book publisher.
Monomaniac, introvert, slow thinker, and love finding a different point of view.
California native, I now live in New Zealand.
Time line for context:
- 1969: born in California
- 1976: started playing piano, viola, and clarinet
- 1979: got a TRS-80 computer and dove deep into programming in BASIC
- 1983: started playing guitar, decided I wanted to be a successful musician
- 1987: started Berklee College of Music in Boston
- 1988: joined a circus, as ringleader/MC musician
- 1990: graduated college, moved to New York City, got a job at Warner/Chappell Music
- 1992: quit my job, and toured Japan as Ryuichi Sakamoto’s guitarist
- 1993: lived alone on the Oregon coast for 7 months, writing and recording music full-time, in a town with a population of 2
- 1994: played around New York and universities with my band “Hit Me”, and the Professional Pests
- 1995: started a record label, booking agency, and recording studio
- 1996: recorded and released my album
- 1997: started CD Baby
- 1998: quit the circus, after 10 years and about 1000 shows
- 1999: started HostBaby
- 2000: moved to Portland, Oregon
- 2002: moved to Santa Monica, California
- 2007: rough year, moved to London, decided to quit my company
- 2008: moved to San Francisco, sold CD Baby and HostBaby
- 2009: moved to New York City, started writing and speaking more
- 2010: spoke at TED three times in a year, moved to Singapore
- 2011: published “Anything You Want” book about my CD Baby days, started Wood Egg
- 2012: had a baby
- 2013: moved to New Zealand to raise him in nature and be a mostly-full-time dad
- 2014 to 2018: sabbatical, but answered 92,354 emails from 33,776 people
- 2017: started writing “How to Live”
- 2019: moved to Oxford, England
- 2020: moved back New Zealand, released “Your Music and People” and “Hell Yeah or No”
- 2021: finished and released the best thing I’ve ever written: “How to Live”
From TED.com:
Derek Sivers is best known as the founder of CD Baby. A professional musician since 1987, he started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too. CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients. In 2008, Sivers sold CD Baby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians.