The Conclusion of the Harrowing CD Baby Non-Saga

My little tiny-violin, poor-me post about CD Baby clearing its shelves of my old 2004 album has become something of a roller coaster. After I posted the piece, I then went to follow CD Baby’s instructions and told them to go ahead and recycle the three copies of the four they had, and they’d keep one in stock. Upon reading the piece, one person actually buys a copy. Then CD Baby themselves post in the comments section, and here’s the important part:

Hi Paul,
This is Anna over at CD Baby! Thanks for the honest feedback. We really appreciate you choosing CD Baby to sell your music.
All of us here decided that we should keep your CDs for now.

Our promise is that will always retain a copy of your album in our warehouse no matter what happens.

Well howdy! “All of them” decided! I responded that this was wholly unnecessary, and that I was under no illusions of the CD’s viability.

But then, someone else buys the other two once-doomed copies! So, if you’re keeping track, that means there was only one copy left, which is what would have been the case had they just recycled what they wanted to get rid of.

Then someone bought that one, and I get this email:

Help! We need more copies of Paul Fidalgo: Paul is Making Me Nervous.

Congratulations! You’ve sold enough CDs through CD Baby that our all-knowing inventory management computer wants you to know that we need more discs to satisfy anticipated demand.

Wow! Well, though they once wanted to have only one copy around, that special comment from Anna at CD Baby said they wanted to have more copies on hand, after all! So how many copies to they want me to restock with???

quantity: 1

And we end where we began. That should satisfy demand, don’t you think?

* * *

Thanks to all those who expressed (sudden) interest in my music, by the way. If you really want a copy of 2004’s Paul is Making Me Nervous, you can get a real CD here (and that will come straight from me), or download that album here or my 2008 collection Evidence of Absence here.