Derek Sivers

Yes my site is plain on purpose. It’s my minimalist desire for only what’s needed.

Me in 10 seconds

I started CDBaby and HostBaby long ago. My short audio/book about it tells you everything I learned while starting, growing, and selling the business.

California native, I now live in Oxford, England.

Anything You Want (2011): 40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur: my tales of starting, building, and selling CD Baby
Your Music and People (2019): a philosophy for musicians (and normal people) of getting your work to the world by being creative, considerate, resourceful, descriptive, focused, and connected
Hell Yeah or No (2019): a collection of thoughts around re-defining yourself, changing focus, and saying yes to less
How to Live (2019): radically different approaches to life, in succinct directives

If you want the announcements and opportunities that I never post publicly, get on my private email list, here:

Book Notes: detailed notes from the last 250+ books I’ve read
Now Now Now: a collection of sites that have a “what I’m doing now” page
MusicThoughts: inspiring quotes about music, translated into Español, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Português, Русский, العربية, 日本語, and 中文

TED (ted.com): 3 short talks from the TED Conference.
Anything You Want: 7 short animations from my book “Anything You Want”.
Uncommon Sense: Entrepreneur lessons learned from starting, building, and selling CD Baby.
Conference Presentations: Talks from other conferences, all subjects.

Through 2015, I got personal and poured my heart into 40 hours of interviews.

Each one has an MP3 you can download, or a transcript if you prefer to read.

July 31: My old clothes don’t fit : https://sivers.org/clothes
July 18: Hearing Arvo Pärt “Für Alina” for the first time and loving it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BCr_Alina (Took 2+ listens to slow down my inner clock and appreciate.) Thanks to https://joellaviolette.com/ for the tip.
July 1: I’ve answered 811 emails in the last 5 days. This might be unsustainable.
July 1: doors and windows and what’s real : https://sivers.org/dw
June 25: I’ve often been with someone and wished I was alone. I’ve never been alone and wished I was not.
June 25: Instead of many hours nudging things with a mouse in Pro Tools or Cubase, I wrote a little Ruby script to use sox to programmatically generate it. So much better: https://gist.github.com/sivers/b900bf4004e148b32a5ddf3fffbe3a1c

(micro.blog/sivers is a nice mirror of my posts.)