What would you do?
An interesting thing has been happening between James Brausch and CD Baby.
CDBaby has been running a contest for the top selling CD, and James Brausch has been promoting his CDBaby CD’s from his blog. He has achieved top spot, but it seems that CDBaby is trying to cheat him out of it.
James has the option of suing CDBaby, or ignoring their behaviour. He has asked his blog readers what they would do. I would ignore them and take my business elsewhere. Here is why:
The amount of money gained suing CDBaby would be miniscule compared to the amount that could be gained putting that same time, effort, and energy into creating and promoting - two things that James does very well.
Also, while I do believe in justice, I don’t believe in vengence, and often lawsuits end up being more about vengeance then justice. It is just bad energy that hurts all parties involved.
In my opinion, the bottom line would be better served by forgiving, and moving your business elsewhere. As for justice, why worry about giving CDBaby what they deserve? They haven’t worried about giving James what he deserves, so what should it matter if CDBaby gets their punishment/reward now or later? CDBaby is being short sighted and losing valuable online goodwill. A lawsuit might even help CDBaby fix their actions and profit them more in the future. If this is the case, and the lawsuit is done at the expense of James Brausch’s emotional energy and time (much more valuable then any money involved,) then is that justice? I don’t think so.
-Steve
August 30th, 2007 at 11:34 am
I was surprised to find out that the winner of our contest thinks that our software update that was 2.5 years in the making was somehow an aggressive act of cheating one person out of sales.
I have emailed James personally with some details, not worth going into here. But in short : during a massive software update, our site was down for 30 minutes, that’s all. And an email James sent with his tracking numbers for warehouse restock were not received. I’m sorry to hear that James took it personally, but he’s winning the contest (by far: over twice as many sales as the #2 slot) anyway.
–
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
August 30th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
[…] Next go back to why you decided to participate in the contest in the first place. I was under the impression that you set out to get the record deal. That or the warm fuzzy feeling of decimating the competition or whatever else — have the glitches (human or technical, intentional or circumstantial) honestly had an impact on your initial goal? You’re allowing what seemed like good fun (woohoo! comes to mind) to be tainted by your interpretation of arbitrary events. The deck has always been stacked against you and yet you’ve become one of the 2%. Why should this contest be any different? (Hint, it isn’t.) Someone claiming to be Derek from CDBaby posted a reply that Brausch has a factor of two lead on the second place. Independent of who is announced winner of the contest I think everyone has won. Well, everyone will win when Brausch recognizes how many more people (800?) he will be reaching and helping. That is what you love to do, isn’t it James. […]
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