Starbucks officially gets out of the music biz
… as foreshadowed here. And if nothing else, the Sonic Youth promotion was an excellent sign that the company’s music plans had gone straight off the track. The Silicon Valley Insider story is here:
Starbucks, which has been scaling back its once-grand ambitions to turn itself into an entertainment hub, is about to shrink its plans yet again. We hear that by September, the chain will have dumped almost all of its in-store music retail offerings.
That means no more “spinner” racks offering multiple CD choices to latte-buyers. And that also means no more gift cards and promotional giveaways for Apples iTunes (AAPL). Instead, we’re told, the coffee chain will offer just four CD “slots” per store. But it will also continue to offer free Wi-fi access to Apple’s online music store and may continue to try to sell entertainment online.
The Insider repeats two Starbucks music factoids that seem to be contradictory: That the company was selling more than four million CDs a year, but that (per a Jeff Leeds NYT story from March) the average per store was but two discs sold each day. Given that the company has 10,000 stores, roughly, in the U.S. and another five around the world, those two figures don’t gibe. (If the two-discs-per-day figure is true, the company would have sold seven million CDs in the U.S. each year, or more than ten million if they were counting international outlets. The discrepancy seems to come from a distinction the Times was making between company-owned outlets and licensed ones.)
Anyway, the real reason the campaign collapsed is that it was all based on novelty. You might buy a Norah Jones CD in line at Starbucks if you like her, you were going to buy it anyway, and you notice it on the counter. And then, caught up in the excitement of an effective marketing campaign, you might grab the McCartney disc a month later. But at that point reality kicks in: Most folks were quickly reminded why they hadn’t bought the last dozen or so McCartney albums. (His songwriting talents have deserted him.) Other so-called Starbucks artists don’t sell many records in any case. (Like Lucinda, for example.) And the shift to more mainstream acts, like James Blunt, drained away the novelty.
The myth that this was an important story was agrreably parroted by the press, which unaccountably found the idea of Starbucks selling CDs (or helping to publicize a movie, Akeelah and the Bee, for which the producers of the film paid Starbucks) endlessly fascinating and gave the company reams of publicity for what were essentially marketing agreements.How this was any more interesting than Orville Redenbacher, for example, setting up a popcorn kiosk at a Blockbuster, except less intuitive, was never clear.
8 Comments so far
Leave a reply
And this sentence doesn’t mean anything more than “it will continue to offer free Wi-fi access” — any free Wi-fi access will also give access to Apple’s online music store — so is entirely irrelevant to the story. They might as well say that Starbucks is going into the book business because their free Wi-fi gives access to Amazon.
Curious to see what happens to the artists signed to Hear Music - McCartney, Mitchell, etc - now that it has been handed over to Concord Music Group (by the way - who/what is Concord Music Group?). Suddenly these big names seem to be stuck on a label that might have just lost all its muscle.
Have to defend Sir Paul! He’s written several haunting tunes over the past decade which are ignored or lost in what are seen as mediocre albums. “From a Lover to a Friend” “Young Boy” and the horribly-named “Heather” are melodies that few other individual artists can match in the same period (what the hell has Blunt done besides ‘You’re Beautiful’?). The hated ‘Off the Ground’ album has four tunes I have on my ipod; ‘Wine Dark Open Sea’ is what I mean by brass in muck. Perhaps if an eccentric techno-beat were mastered into the songs to derange them to something unrecognisable, they may meet your seal of approval.
I have often noted Hitsville’s inability to appreciate anything without an eccentric techno-beat.
Mr. or Mrs Scraps rips on Bill’s sentence about free wi-fi, but I think the point is that Starbuck’s charges for wifi (right?), but wi-fi is free in their stores to access the iTunes store. If that’s the case, I think it’s significant and worth noting.
It’s not Bill’s sentence, it’s from the Silicon Valley Insider story he quoted.
Starbucks used to charge for Wi-Fi — which was pretty silly — but now they give two hours a day free.
You are right, right & right again, Bill. Except about Chaos & Creation In The Backyard. That’s a decent record!
Hi Bill!
Can’t believe more McCartney fans didn’t rip your head off!
Thanks for the chuckle.
Kathryn