Okayplayer: CDNow Was A Hero To Most But They Never Meant Shit To Me
AS TOLD BY LIRON K. ANDERSON-BELL: This is more of a 6 Degrees of Digital Philadelphia situation. Back in 2000, when I was a new hire at CDNOW — I think I was Senior Manager of Marketing Marvelousness or some such blather — I, along with my boss Joe Bilman (now Chief Product Officer at Thumbplay) took a meeting with Shawn Gee, the head of a new, hip, blog-meets-Roots fansite-meets-user forum music community called Okayplayer.com. This was back when affiliate programs were all the rage. Joe and I realized that Okayplayer was going to be something special, and offered Shawn the same affiliate package that we’d built for Amazon.com. Pretty impressive, right? Wrong. Mr. Gee summarily dismissed the offer, explaining that it wasn’t lucrative enough and that we didn’t see how influential Okayplayer.com was going to be. We all shook hands and moved on, each party thinking that the other had missed a great opportunity.
Well, fast forward to 2001 — CDNOW began the depressing wholesale layoffs and over the next year or so, gradually shut down. Interestingly, Okayplayer was still standing. Major bands and brands had come on board the popular “neosoul Mecca.” The forums had grown exponentially, the site’s appeal was international, and its original blogger, Penn grad Angela Nissel, had gone on to NBC’s Scrubs as a writer and scored a book deal with Random House (signed by another Penn grad, Melody Guy) to publish her insanely hilarious student blog, “The Broke Diaries.”
A few more years passed and as (bad) luck would have it, another company that hired me fell on hard times. Guess who was hiring? Okayplayer.com, who brought me on board as Director of Marketing. They’d grown even more and users were now heavily courted tastemakers. There were now guest bloggers, which I became one of (writing under nom de plume “labell”), and the “Okaystore” was transforming into a robust retail operation. Anyway, I only stayed there a year, but the entire time I was there I wondered when someone would say “I told you so!”
