Derek Sivers – Author Biography
Derek Sivers is an entrepreneur, musician, and author best known as the founder of CD Baby, the pioneering online store for independent musicians. After selling the company, he became a beloved writer of ultra-short, unconventional books on business and life, published on his own terms from his famously minimalist website.
Early Life
Derek Sivers was born on September 22, 1969. He studied music at Berklee College of Music in Boston, training as a guitarist and immersing himself in composition, production, and performance. From 1987 onward he worked as a professional musician — and, memorably, as a circus clown — performing across the United States and Europe.
Career
In 1998, Sivers was selling his own CD through his website when fellow musicians asked if he could sell theirs too. That accident became CD Baby, which grew into the largest online seller of independent music, paying out over $100 million to more than 150,000 musicians. In 2008 he sold CD Baby for $22 million — and gave the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education, keeping only a modest annual payout for himself. He later founded Wood Egg, publishing guides to doing business across Asia, and became a sought-after speaker, including a well-known TED talk. His books — Anything You Want (2011), Your Music and People, and Hell Yeah or No (2015) — are collections of short, aphoristic essays drawn from his blog at sive.rs.
Major Works
Sivers’s books are Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, Your Music and People: Creative and Considerate Fame, and Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing. Each is deliberately brief — readable in about an hour — and each distills years of entrepreneurial experience into plain-spoken principles.
Writing Style and Themes
Sivers writes like he talks: direct, contrarian, and allergic to padding. His essays are often just a few paragraphs long, each built around a single counterintuitive insight — that saying no is a growth strategy, that business is about helping people rather than getting rich, that you should “keep your goals to yourself.” His great theme is independence: from the music industry, from conventional ambition, from other people’s definitions of success. He practices what he preaches, having walked away from a fortune to live simply and write freely.
Legacy
Sivers became a folk hero of the independent internet — proof that a business could be built on generosity and still succeed wildly. His decision to give away CD Baby’s sale proceeds made him a legend among entrepreneurs, and his tiny books have influenced a generation of founders who value autonomy over empire. He has lived in Singapore, New Zealand, and elsewhere, embodying the location-independent life his writing celebrates.
