Slashdot Mirror
Starbucks - Your Next Music Superstore?
prostoalex writes "The Fast Company magazine looks into the next horizon in music retailing - allowing customers to choose the songs they like in relaxed environment and burning custom CDs from digital copies of the content. The claimed innovator in the field is none other than Seattle-based Starbucks: 'This August, Starbucks will install individual music-listening stations, with CD-burning capabilities, in 10 existing Starbucks locations in Seattle. From there, the concept rolls out to Texas in the fall, including Starbucks stores in the music mecca of Austin. With the help of technology partner Hewlett-Packard, Starbucks plans to have 100 coffee shops across the country enabled with Hear Music CD-burning stations by next Christmas, and more than 1,000 locations up and running by the end of 2005.' And what's wrong with traditional music outlets? 'Schultz and MacKinnon came to believe that the core Starbucks customer, an affluent 25- to 50-year-old who's likelier to be tuned in to NPR than to MTV or one of the nine gazillion radio stations owned by Clear Channel Communications Inc., probably feels ignored by the music industry.'"
That's 0.00000001% of the Seattle locations.
An epic task, given the nature of caffeine.
Schultz and MacKinnon came to believe that the core Starbucks customer, an affluent 25- to 50-year-old who's likelier to be tuned in to NPR than to MTV or one of the nine gazillion radio stations owned by Clear Channel Communications Inc., probably feels ignored by the music industry.'"
:-P
Wonder how they came to that conclusion.
I also wonder why the music industry hasn't.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
'Schultz and MacKinnon came to believe that the core Starbucks customer, an affluent 25- to 50-year-old who's likelier to be tuned in to NPR than to MTV or one of the nine gazillion radio stations owned by Clear Channel Communications Inc., probably feels ignored by the music industry.'
What Starbucks are they looking at? The few times I've been in a Starbucks, it's been full of dumb teenagers humming Brittney Spears songs. It's not like the stuff they're promoting isn't mainstream anyway. It's just a different branch of mainstream.
Show me a Starbucks where they play Mineral, Freakwater, or Belle and Sebastian, and I'll be impressed.
(On a slightly related note: one of the funniest things I have ever seen was at a Starbucks in St. Louis, MO, where I went to college. A bunch of punk kids (15-18 years old, I'd guess), with their anarchy patches and bright colored mohawks, were sitting outside the local Starbucks, happily sipping their corporate-whore coffee. I laughed my ass off. Ah, the irony.)
You don't have to be the person you've become.
This has the potential to become another non-conventional music outlet like iTMS, but only if they do it right.
The "NPR-not-MTV listener" they are catering to will have widely varying music tastes, not just the Top 40. How much of a selection will each Starbucks provide? Do they plan to have T1 linkups to a central server? If they work with local storage, then the source tracks will probably be already compressed tracks, affecting quality. I don't see each Starbucks having a half-terabyte RAID array to hold losslessly compressed originals.
Secondly, price. This can be a one-stop-music-shop, catering not just to those who see it and burn/buy a CD on a whim. Since it doesn't offer any of the advantages of iTMS-style music downloads (instant transfer to computers, portables, etc.), they better price it at less than $0.99 a track. A fixed-price option, e.g. 1 80-minute CD for $12-$15 might be very popular.
It's upto Starbucks to use its enormous geographical clout to negotiate a sweetheart deal with the recording industry, and make it as attractive to the customer as possible. Otherwise, with audio-CD only Discmans going the way of the dodo, and the growing popularity of iTMS-like solutions, this scheme will turn out at best to be a novelty.
I hate Starbucks but Schultz and MacKinnon are 100% correct. Here in Baton Rouge we have several shops that purchase, blend and roast their own coffee. Their coffee kicks Starbuck and typically cost less but good music is very attractive. I hate record stores more by a longshot than I hate the home of a second rate $4.00 cup of coffee. A set up like this could make me love them.
Now, if only they have the guts and brains to get away from RIAA label music, they would be my heros.
I RTFA expecting to come out of it thinking "gee, brand dilution like this usually means the beginning of the end for companies." Instead, I was surprised to end up thinking what a neat idea this could be, if implemented correctly.
I think I'm probably preaching to the choir here when I say that there are lots of songs out there that I like but so very few full albums that I want to own. Thus, the joy that is P2P and iTMS; combined with a cd burner, all the music I listen to in my car these days is mixed the way I want it to be, and in ways you'll never find on a commercial mix (try finding a CD with Nightwish, E Nomine, and L'Arc en~Ciel on it ^_^). So the idea of a mix cd with actual labelling and even liner notes is naturally fairly appealing. Simply put, it passes the "I'd give it a try" test.
Three major questions that aren't answered in the article, though, which would be major deciding factors for me:
Nevertheless, I think this is a fairly neat idea; the current distribution models for music have left a lot of great stuff behind, so going back to a system where people can get recommendations and such is pretty cool. And the inclusion of the Audiogalaxy-esque "you might also like . . ." feature is just awesome; that was my favorite part of AG, and it's something I sorely miss.