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Burnt Coffee and Burnt CDs
senzafine writes "Cnet reports that HP and Starbucks are jointly working on Storefront Coffeeshops which will allow people to browse and listen to music from a digital library...and have selected songs burned to cd. Sounds really cool...wonder how long before Starbucks and HP get John Doe lawsuits in the mail. --- But does this seem like an idea that would work?"
Yes. Would the prices be reasonable? Doubtful.
I'd like to calm the rhetoric. Sure, common sense would indicate the RIAA's copyrights have been violated. But copyright has been heavily legislated over the past century to the point that common sense or common law is nearly absent. It has such things as compulsory licences and device royalties. Morality should be confined to governing personal actions and advocating revisions to intellectual property law. It is disingenuous for the RIAA to invoke morality when if anything they have had excessive influence in crafting legislation.
IANAL but lets look at the law. Once you know the tokens, legalese is not usually harder to parse than APL :) Apologies for a
US-centric viewpoint but I believe a statutory situation exists in
all other common-law countries with different details. There's an
excellent copy of the United States Code, Title 17 - Copyrights at Cornell.
Chapter 10 covers DIGITAL AUDIO RECORDING DEVICES AND MEDIA .
Particularly interesting is:
Sec. 1008. - Prohibition on certain infringement actions... No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings
Simply breathtaking! The words "this title" mean Title 17, which contains all of US copyright law. The first "based on" means these things are not actionable as contributory negligence ("burglars tools"). The second "based on" means non-commercial use of these things does not violate copyright. Wow!
The definitions in Sec.1001 would seem to include computers. They sure are designed, advertised and used that way amongst others. But all is not [Guns'N'] roses. The manufacturers of these recording devices would seem to owe a device tax that gets paid through the Librarian-of-Congress (of all people!) to the RIAA as specified. There are also requirements related to the Serial Copy Management System. I trust that RIAA have settled this with their long-standing antagonists, appliance manufacturers, now including Dell, HP, et al. But even if not, how does it affect me?
The term "noncommercial use" would almost certainly cover receiving music files to make recordings on a hard-disk. Offering to transmit music files might not be covered and fall under the exceptionally byzantine Sec.114 as an "interactive service". But a lawyer specialising in Copyright law should be able to give a better interpretation including case precedents. The Diamond Rio MP3 player case is probably relevant. Is there a lawyer in the house?
Given HP's recent relationship with Apple on a rebranded iPod, does that mean that 1) the tunes sold in starbucks will be AAC and/or 2) that iTunes will be involved?
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...as saying "All your coffee are belong to us." during a raid of a local Starbucks while seizing 20 computers, 400lbs of coffee beans, and a 12 year old Indian girl with one leg.
Coffee - and coasters to put the mugs on, too! It just doesn't get better than that... :)
This distribution method seems ideal for Linux also. Perhaps if HP weren't afraid of MS, we could also get nice bootable Linux distro while waiting for a venti mocha.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I don't know, this sounds like a dumb idea to me. I mean, I just don't see the synnergy between the two brands. If I want to go out for coffee, I go out for coffee. If I want to listen to music, I either go to a club or (back before I decided to boycott music) check out a music store. I guess some people go to coffee places to pick up girls and flirt, and amongst the young musical tastes can be a critical selection trait, and the young are an attractive demographic to target, but even so I don't see this catching on, really.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Why must everyone be involved with music these days? Pepsi, Coke, Starbucks....
What's next? I'm going to get a free song with a Happy Meal? I guess there are a lot of execs out there that think if you don't offer music in one way or another, then you must be doomed. I esitmate that in a few years, we will be back to several high quality music choices.
--
Real-time deal updates
This actually would work out quite nicely for Starbucks, because all music [i]currently[/i] in store is put out by their own label.
Kids these days. They don't know the difference between classic, and just plain old.
I'm curious as to what possible reasoning Starbucks used to enter this completely alien market. There's little money to be made from it and it seems impractical due to the time required to both burn the CD and create the playlist. Unless their goal is to keep the customer in their store for longer periods of time -- which I could see as a viable business model -- there really doesn't seem to be any strategy involved.
As an employee of a publically-traded rival corporation [Peet's Coffee & Tea] I'm not exactly unbiased here, but I'm wondering what others have to say about the strategy behind such a radical departure from the typical role of a coffee shop.
I'm not popular enough to be different.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
If HP and StarBucks can get this going legally and without hassles from RIAA et al against them or customers, wouldn't the next logical step be offering downloads directly to your iPAQ?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Who loses in the end? The music stores, anyway.
At long last the secret of Starbucks' "very good coffee" is revealed: burn the holy living shit out of your beans!
Now you, too, can have that wonderful taste of charred coffee in your very own home!
Sure, they'll make big bucks with just Britney, Justin and Limp Bizkit available. Cause everyone knows people who drink coffee at Starbucks don't have taste.
The article states that Starbucks is working in conjunction with Hear Music. I know that in Chicago, there is (or was, havent been there in awhile) a Starbucks that had a Hear Music CD store next door. The two stores were connected, and you could bring your coffee in with you while you browsed for CDs and listened to music at the listening stations. Sounds like this is just a natural extension of that. And I think its a great idea. I'm not too optomistic about getting one in Pittsburgh, however, where the only common record store chain (NRM) is long since gone and bankrupt and a Virgin Megastore or even a Tower Records has never touched the shores of the Mon River. But I digress.
And you want to know why? Because you have no clue as to how to read the law.
Sec. 1002. - Incorporation of copying controls
No person shall import, manufacture, or distribute any digital audio recording device or digital audio interface device that does not conform to -
(1)
the Serial Copy Management System;
Computers do not conform to SCMS. So either computers are illegal or computers cannot be considered a digital audio recording device. It's your choice. I'd rather pick choice #2.
I think the reason for the music tie-in is that there's more and more competition for the coffee-drinker's dollar and they need to come up with new ways to stand out. Within two blocks of my apartment, there's a Starbucks, a Seattle's best, and two local coffee houses. 10 minute's walk up the street, there a cluster of about 6 more coffee places, including 2 Starbucks at the same intersection.
But between the insane cost and the burnt flavour of their coffee, I never go to Starbucks and the ability to put together a CD isn't going to entice me.
i think they do quite a bit in the hope of luring customers and getting them to linger to maybe buy a second round or other stuff. they play music, provide tables outside, sell newspapers, easy bwireless access.... i'm not that wild about their coffee buy will pay extra not to be told to leave right away. :)
also i suspect starbucks feels pressure to continually reinvent itself rather be perceived as yesterday's coffee news. notice how mcdonalds introduces new items of dubious value to get some buzz and quietly drops them later. (or such is my impression, i don't eat there anymore.)
now if only starbucks could make coffee that didn't taste burnt. i like underdogs, good luck peet's. we have an indy coffee place nearby that has *couches* and wireless..... i doubt the chains will go this far, that's just a bit too inviting.
HP can pay back the Canadian DND in songs and coffee. $160 million...now that is a lot of beans.
Either that or the military will fly a Sea King helicopter over their headquarters (Canadians will find that last bit funny).
Which is why it will work. Know your demographic. If you're silly enough to pay too much for bad coffee, you'll more than likely pay too much for bad music....
Have they even been into one of their shops recently? On any given morning the place is packed beyond all reason. Adding a laptop listening station and headphones will only add to that problem.
There are three types of people in starbucks: Those freaky, overhyped, quad-shot espresso people, who are terminally late to work and just forgot to pick up their kids from soccer practice; the blue collar men in dirty clothes who are so relaxed you would think someone slipped prozac into their spam; and the college kids / young pros with their laptops who come to get some work done in the peace and quiet of a store full of caffeine withdrawal victims screaming for soy milk in their peppermint no-whip half-caf grande white mochas. None of the above seem like the type who would hang out to pay for music... too busy, occupied, or just poor. Admittedly, this might fly in the retail store locations (the Starbucks in Barnes and Noble, for example), as they draw a more relaxed, less goal-oriented crowd, but I can hardly see their host stores being happy about the competition.
Starbucks does this every now and then. They had that crazy arrangement with Kozmo before they went Kaput, whereby drop-off stations were strategically placed in every Starbucks in exchange for some significant quantity of realbucks. Kozmo might actually have made it if it wasn't for that tremendous monetary commitment.
Personally, I don't see this arrangement being significantly more successful than that one.
Oh well. They've got the money to try, I guess. Someday they'll find another use for their successful cafe chain. Besides, of course, being the seat of power for Mister Evil. Sorry, Doctor Evil.
*full disclosure- used to be a Barrista. I was young, I needed the money.
The ______ Agenda
Though Linux is very flexible, without all those licensing issues (go ahead and troll, SCO trolls) like Windows, it is highly unlikely that SBUX and HP are going to use it on this system for two reasons that I know of: 1. They are going to use TabletPC's for this, something Linux has somewhat limited support for, particularly in the handwriting recognition aspect. 2. HP's provider of digital music is most likely going to be Apple, and this means a modified version of iTunes. Apple has not included Linux support for anything.
Moreover, 12" Vinyl has made a huge comeback over the past few years because its "mixable" and "scratchable," on turntables, great for live performance purposes.
I'm not sure where you went to law-school (probably not Cornell) but section 1008 mentions nothing of the importation or distrobution of the actual copyrighted material. Section 1008 simply protects CDRs Inc. from being brought to court because their customers were selling copyrighted music on their CDs.
In short: It states that the manufactures are not responsible for what the customers choose to do with their products. I don't know where you drew from this that the customers therefore have the right to "the "sharing" of digital music files".
One thing that could be effective here is the following:
1. A song is playing in Starbucks.
2. You like what you hear.
3. You go to the "jukebox to go" (or whatever they will call it), click the "buy what's on now" button, and pay $1 for the song and $1 for the CD ($2.00 total).
I keep thinking about the scene in High Fidelity, where John Cusack says "I'm going to sell a copy of x album right now" and then puts on a record. Sure enough, someone comes up and asks what is playing and buys it. The impulse buy in an environment is powerful. I often hear things in record stores, etc. and would love to have an easy way to buy it.
It says right on their site that they're using an HP branded version of iTunes. I'm not sure if this will extend to the Starbucks deal but it seems extremely likely. Why would they choose Apple, iTunes and the iPod and then offer a service that competes with that?
loser.
"Derp de derp."
I wouldn't consider a buck a song unreasonable if I could pick the songs, as opposed to paying $15 for a CD with one or two good songs and filler.
And who would buy a CD with one song on it? That would waste storage space. Just buy lots of songs (assuming they have a decently-sized library). They're not filler because you pick them. They need a minimum price per CD to cover the overheads associated with each CD.
Somebody tried something like this around 1990, IIRC. You would pick songs from a catalog and order them from a store (Newbury Comics in Boston was one dealer), and the company would send an audio cassette to the store so you could pick it up in a few days. I browsed the catalog, but they never had songs I was interested in (stuff from 10 years before that I didn't already have on CD), and they died before they could expand the catalog. (Ironically, I ended up buying a few regular CDs after hearing some songs I recognized but hadn't known who played them.)
Burn to cd ? Not so useful. But burn to your iPod there and then.. now *that* would be good.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:
Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.
Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.
This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.
My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.
The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)
If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.
The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.
Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)
This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.
In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.
It's this fumbling that's I orig
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
What exactly are they selling?
- a Raw Audio track in all ways identical to what you get when you purchase a mass-market factory-pressed CD?
- the WAV file equivalent?
- the {insert preferred lossless encoded format here} equivalent?
- a 320Kbps encoded MP3? (ie plays everywhere and not-quite-but-nearly-as-good-as-lossless)
- a 16kbps encoded MP3? (ie totally-crap-but-still-plays-anywhere)
- the {insert hellspawn DRM managed format here} equivalent?
Methinks people need to wake up and smell the HYPE.(ie buy ~16 of these and you have "an audio CD")
If this was a shameless attempt to score off the recent Digital Music wave, it didn't work. Yahoo Finance shows SBUX Stock didn't do all that well Friday (Reuters had this news Thu March 11 ~8pm)
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OK.. I like a coffee shop in Fort Collins CO that offers internet access.
This coffee shop has entered into no strategic alliances, nor has it spent a ton of money to get internet access.
Basically, what I am curious about is why HP and Starbucks are spending a lot of money hyping a new product line that any coffee shop with internet access offers.
Isn't this basically just a Starbucks using HP computers to hook to iTunes?
That's hardly a revolutionary concept.
I have already seen shops doing this. And, these days, HP on the label of a new innovative direction is a huge redflag. Is this really worth the investment for either company? Starbucks is adding a partner to sell it's own product and split the sales. HP is adding a retail component in an area outside it's expertise. And, the barrier to entry for competition is something like $100 a month..
Anyone with internet access and a couple cd burners at a coffee shop is competition as iTunes is *legal* for use.
Want to bet that they will be trying to roll that horrible IT contract Starbucks signed for internet access into this operation, then slam people with the charges to offset their losses in their regular stores? They were having a lot of customers balk at paying an internet access fee for coffee, but would that apply to a store that is an internet music store first?
I want it beamed straight to my iPod, or I'm not interseted.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Yeah, they do seem to over-roast a bit. I think they do this to cover the uneven quality of their beans. As "luxury" coffee goes, Starbucks ain't nothin' to write home about. They aren't using premium beans and their blends are distinguished only for their uniformity.
It bothers me that people assume coffee is good just because it's served with an Italian name and costs three bucks a serving.
I really like coffee and have spent some time teaching myself how to make a decent cup and be able to tell the difference between packaging and actual quality. Starbucks is going for nearly $8.00 a bag for beans these days (and is STILL not Fair Trade coffee, even at those outrageous prices). On the other hand, a comparable bag of Community Coffee French Roast is about three bucks. Properly prepared, there is no practical difference in the qualities of CCFR and Starbuck's House Blend. They use similar grades of coffee beans and arrive at the store with approximately the same degree of freshness.
There are plenty of expensive coffees out there really worth the money for their rarity, freshness, and blend. But they usually don't come in Starbucks wrappers.
For whatever it's worth.
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