Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  African American and Latino music also cast a kind of vicarious integrationism over Starbucks stores. Creative class types often talk about their desire for diversity. Not all of them, though, live in integrated neighborhoods, so they express their interest in multiculturalism in their food and music choices.17 The apparent freedom, hipness, and symbolic value of older African American music, however, didn’t extend to Grand Master Flash, L L Cool J, NWA, or Public Enemy. Starbucks edited gangsta rap and hip-hop sounds out of the coffee shops. What Chuck D once called the “CNN of the streets” was maybe too authentic and certainly didn’t conjure up the same nostalgia for older coffeehouse culture that Miles Davis or James Brown did. Maybe rap pointed out too many deep, intractable contemporary problems and the limits of liberal integrationism as espoused by Starbucks and its customers. Whatever the reasons, Brewster didn’t believe these sounds of rage and rebellion against injustice would sell lattes or the brand itself. But still the coffeehouse music he and his colleagues did play exposed the new generation of espresso drinkers to some of the most enduring and dusty classics of American, especially African American, music.

  Brewster used two filters to sort through overhead programming and compilation choices. Generally artists had to fit into either the “emerging” or “enduring” category to get airplay at the stores and on the Hear Music label. Using these guiding principles of discovery and rediscovery, he thought (and he was probably right) that by the turn of the new century, “Starbucks was having a positive incremental impact on the music business. We were introducing new artists to consumers in a comfortable setting and providing a trustworthy filtering system.”

  HALLEY’S COMET AND BEYOND

  In 2004, Halley’s Comet hit. That’s what Brewster called Ray Charles’s Concord Records/Hear Music-produced CD, Genius Loves Company. Timed to come out at the same time as the red carpet release of the studio-made bio-pic Ray, the collection featured duets—often recorded in distant studios—with the R&B legend and Alison Krauss, Norah Jones, James Taylor, Elton John, Gladys Knight, and a few others. Unlike Charles’s sizzling Atlantic Records sessions of the early 1960s, these songs have a quiet, almost subdued feel, in part because Charles was ill when he cut most of the tracks. In fact, Charles died before the film came out and before the CD was officially released. Many, it seemed, mourned the singer’s death by buying the disc. Starbucks went on to sell seven hundred thousand units at full price of Genius Loves Company, helping it become a platinum-selling record and Charles’s biggest-selling CD of all time. The disc also won eight Grammy Awards.18

  The bottom-line guys at Starbucks headquarters, presumably the ones who came from Pathmark and 7-Eleven, looked at the Genius Loves Company phenomenon, Brewster believes, as a “benchmark, not an aberration.” They wanted to repeat the performance again and again, driving up revenues and bolstering same-store sales, a figure closely followed on Wall Street that measures ongoing revenues at fast-food units opened for more than a year. Stock prices could rise or fall with small jumps or slight declines in this number. CD sales, like sales of breath mints, breakfast sandwiches, and stuffed animals, could keep same-store sales numbers moving up even when coffee purchases stagnated. According to Brewster, the role of music changed as a result. Artists and tunes no longer served essentially as brand builders—as ways to create a feeling of authenticity and an aura of discovery to match the coffee. Now company officials wanted the music to generate revenues and pump up the value of the stock.

  Howard Schultz tapped Ken Lombard, who worked alongside Magic Johnson in the basketball star’s many post-hoops commercial ventures— including his opening of “urban” coffee shops in African American neighborhoods with Starbucks—as the architect of Starbucks’ musical makeover. While Lombard knew business, he didn’t know all that much about Rolling Stone–style FM music. He certainly didn’t spend his college years making mixed tapes for dorm mates at a private New England school. One company watcher told journalist David Margolick in 2008 that when Lombard took over Hear Music, he had never listened to The Who and thought Steely Dan was a person.19 But these gaps in his listening experience didn’t stop Lombard from trying to engineer a seismic shift in the geography of music buying for his target audience of upper-middle-class white professionals and their emulators.

  A few years after effectively replacing Don MacKinnon at Hear Music, Lombard told music journalist Dan DeLuca that he wanted Starbucks to move from a “niche player” into a “destination when it comes to discovering new music.” As this move started to take shape, discovery went the way of coffee and a third place. It became more a matter of insistence than of substance. Lombard schemed to turn daily latte drinkers into consumers of convenience.20 Having already gotten them into the stores to satisfy their caffeine fix or look for office space or the promise of conversation, Starbucks now tried to ratchet up their purchases. The company doubled and maybe even quadrupled the number of CDs and CD display racks in its stores. Often company representatives put several musical choices right next to the cash register. Everyone from Wal-Mart managers to Gap designers knows that this is the spot to create impulse purchases.

  Starbucks catered to latte consumers of convenience. The company’s forty-something, college-educated patrons were perhaps the people who most missed that guy down the dorm hall to recommend tunes to them. These were people for whom music represented an “identifier”—a way to communicate something about themselves and their tastes. Yet they found themselves ten, fifteen years out of college, caught in the middle of changing buying patterns. By 2000, the music business was in turmoil. Radio stations fragmented along sharper market lines. Young fans, meanwhile, never set foot into a record store. They downloaded tunes. I once asked a group of teens where they bought their music. “Online,” they all answered, sparing me the “duh” while still making sure that I knew I had asked a stupid question. Record stores felt the effects of these kids’ retreat. Sales dropped and profits sagged. In 2004, Tower Records filed for bankruptcy. Two years later, Sam Goody followed suit, shutting down 226 of its CD-selling outlets.21 The closings left boomers, still wedded to the album format, with fewer places to get their old music and discover new music.

  The woes of the CD store created a commercial gap, and Starbucks jumped into the void. In the same way that decreased funding for public space had generated a need for meeting places and, in turn, a wind-fall opportunity for the company, the dearth of music-buying options provided the firm with yet another avenue for profit making. With its more than sixteen thousand stores and even more display racks, Starbucks bought in bulk and wrangled deep discounts from studios desperate to get their merchandise in front of consumers. But the coffee company didn’t pass the savings on to latte drinkers. Following the Hear Music model of pricing, it charged top dollar—$15 to $18—for its CDs. “As the music profits poured in,” Brewster told me, “music got a bigger profile at the company.” Starbucks did not just create soundscapes any-more and sell a few CDs; it sold CDs and created background music to drive up sales.

  Once Starbucks moved headlong into the record business, it changed its offerings. It still sold Artist’s Choice CDs, jazz and blues collections, and music from South Africa and South America, but those discovery CDs stayed on the racks. Right by the cash register, managers stacked music from Dave Matthews and Coldplay, Bob Dylan and Tony Bennett, Alanis Morissette and Frank Sinatra, and Jill Scott and Norah Jones. Flexing its marketing muscles for a new day in the music business, Starbucks played these songs in its stores and on its spot on XM Satellite Radio. Later, it would use its privileged corner on iTunes to push its songs just as its boomer customers started to learn to use iPods to down-load music and podcasts of their favorite NPR broadcasts. Starbucks flexed its muscles with the record companies as well. If they wanted a spot for their artists in the coffee shops, they had no choice but to give the company the deep discounts it demanded. But the key to selling music would always be the stores.

  In 2005, j
ust as I dug into my research on Starbucks, the company launched an exclusive deal with Alanis Morissette. Marketing for the new post–record store era, the Canadian singer cut a deal with Starbucks for her acoustic reworking of her megahit, the angry and angst-filled Jagged Little Pill. It would be available at Starbucks and only Starbucks for the first six weeks after its initial release.22 While other music sellers fumed, the company played the CD nonstop in every single U.S. store. After hearing “Hand in My Pocket” and “You Oughta Know” for the fortieth (or was it the four-hundredth?) time, I couldn’t take it anymore. Whenever Alanis’s raspy-thin voice came over the speakers signaling the start of another story of regret and lost love, I ran to the bathroom or outside to hang out with the smokers. Three and a half minutes later, I settled back into my seat. But as soon as I started reading again, she was back. There was no escaping her at Starbucks during that six-week window. My personal pain only translated into strong sales for Alanis and for Starbucks, even if there wasn’t much discovery involved.

  “The current programming,” remarked Brewster in 2007, “reflects the strong priority and preference to highlight content from CDs that are for sale in the stores.” The company hadn’t gone Top 40, he noted, and one could “still encounter some of the old ‘core’ sounds from time to time.” But the new soundtrack reflected a shift away from “the sound of the coffeehouse” to some-thing considerably more commercial. “As Starbucks fancied itself more of a player in the entertainment business,” Brewster maintained in an e-mail to me, “it took on many (too many in my opinion) commercial CDs, like Alanis, Dylan, Radiohead, Rascal Flatts, Dave Matthews, and others, and just like real record retailers, found the need to play the music in order to sell it.” Overall, he thought that “the feel is still sophisticated, though less differentiated from other national retail brands.” When I asked as a follow-up if the music was “safer,” he answered, “Yes, it is safe and sanitized more so than before, which I think makes it much more predictable as well.”

  The year 2005 was not just the year of Alanis. In April, Bruce Springsteen released the CD Devils and Dust. Like the best of his post–Born in the USA work, this is a collection of character-driven portraits of ordinary people facing long odds and even meaner circumstances. In one song, “Reno,” a lonely man on the wrong side of life recounts a late-night meeting with a prostitute in a dingy casino-town motel room. There is no bravado here, but the story does contain a graphic, though not gratuitous, reference to anal sex. Alarmed by the content or maybe the song’s dark tone and painful realism, Starbucks reportedly refused to sell the CD in its stores. (Company officials said they didn’t have rack room for another disc.)23

  Not long after Starbucks announced its decision, Springsteen joked to Philadelphia fans that they could find Devils and Dust at their nearest Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme stores. He could laugh off Starbucks’ rebuff. By that time, he had already sold tens of millions of CDs, seen his face on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and been enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What about other artists?

  Since Starbucks has moved headlong into the music business, it has become an important outlet for buying CDs and getting older sounds and artists back into circulation. With the retro rock front secured, Hear Music and Starbucks decided to once again introduce new talent and turn its audience on to undiscovered artists. As it says on the front of the “company fact sheet,” Starbucks now offers “customers the opportunity to discover quality entertainment in a fun, convenient way” (emphasis added). More than a fact, this is a declaration and an admission: Starbucks intended to remain in the discovery-selling business, but it promised its customers that they wouldn’t encounter anything too daring. The brand’s music choices highlighted the company’s newfound performance of discovery as form, ahead of substance.24

  • • •

  Before 2005, not many people outside New York—or even in New York—had heard of Antigone Rising, a melodious and twangy, some-times classic rock-sounding, sometimes Eagles-inflected, VH1-ready girl group. Nor had they heard any tunes from its five previous indie label records. Someone at Starbucks, however, liked the band’s familiar sound and slightly bobo-chic, Greenwich Village image; signed the quintet as a new artist; and released its live acoustic set, From the Ground Up, to all of the company’s stores, where it played nonstop for months. Although critics panned the record, calling it “vanilla,” “adult contemporary fluff’ “with mild intensity and just a hint of acidity,” it still sold seventy thousand units—an astonishing achievement for a largely unknown band that didn’t tour or get a lot of radio airtime. Starbucks customers bought most of these CDs.25

  Sales figures like these for a new band got the attention of just about everyone in the music business, including an industry stalwart like Paul McCartney. In 2007, Starbucks’ Hear Music teamed up with the Concord Music Group to start its own record label. McCartney signed on as the very first act. “It’s a new world now and people are thinking of new ways to reach the people,” the ex-Beatle maintained, “and for me that’s always been my aim.” When his new CD, Memory Almost Full, debuted in May, it got played all day long at ten thousand Starbucks stores in twenty countries. Starbucks kept playing it for months. The company continued to feature the disc even after McCartney admitted to a reporter to his “everlasting shame” that he usually bypassed Starbucks in favor of a local café next door.26

  When Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and other musical heritage acts get on the coffee company’s CD racks, 20 to 30 percent of their total sales come from Starbucks. The numbers are even higher for first-time acts like Antigone Rising. Record companies, suffering through by then a decade-long slump in sales, stood up and took notice. Many rushed their A&R guys over to Starbucks. Over lavish lunches, they begged the company to carry their new and old artists, compilations, and greatest hits collections. All of a sudden, noted one record executive, it’s like there is a “new cute girl that everyone wants to take to the dance.”27

  What are the implications of Starbucks’ musical prowess and all the courting it gets from record company bigwigs? Will it act as a censor? Will managers and artists take note of the Springsteen story and edit their own work to get inside Starbucks?

  Music critic Mark Kemp thought the Springsteen incident turned Starbucks into a “soul-sucking corporate scum” and, even worse, the “Wal-Mart of Hip.” Like the behemoth from Bentonville, he felt like the coffee shop from Seattle used its might to dictate taste and morality. Fellow music critic David Hadju went a couple of steps farther. In a blistering New Republic piece, he likened Starbucks to the Soviet Union and its soundscape of state-dictated music. Both of these assessments are too harsh. Starbucks isn’t quite Stalin or Big Brother bent on mind control. The end result might not, however, be all that different. Like Kremlin censors, Starbucks regulated choice—not to retain state power but to bolster corporate profits, although the distinction between the role of government and brands gets fuzzier all the time. Starbucks wanted to move drinks and sweets, and to do that in the postneed economic order, it had to manufacture images and feelings—in this case, of discovery and exploration—to drive coffee and music sales. In the process, it narrowed the sounds available. But it did this while actually increasing the number of CDs for sale at the stores, making it hard (again reminiscent in some ways of the control of language under the Kremlin) to tell what was actually happening to our choices. Perhaps that’s how censorship operates in our civically challenged world dominated by consumption and the increased consolidation of corporate media power. It looks like we have more choices when we really have fewer.28

  MAKING THE FAMILIAR LOOK NEW

  With his scrupulously shaved head, rimless glasses, and long-sleeved aqua-colored T-shirt, Bruce Warren looks like what he is: a programming manager at a radio station. Warren works at the Philadelphia taste maker for postcollege music fans, WXPN (which, by the way, runs NPR headlines and gets sponsorship money from Starbucks).


  “Manna from heaven as another distribution point”—that’s how Warren described Starbucks over coffee at an independent shop near his office that played funky jazz as we talked. “I have conversations with musicians and A&R guys all the time,” he said, “and all of them are obsessed with getting their records into Starbucks . . .. They want their stuff to sell,” he reminded me just in case I got too pure and anticorporate on him. New artists are especially fixated on the coffee company. Ninety-eight percent of all CDs, Warren estimated, sell fewer than ten thousand copies. A spot on Starbucks’ racks, however, guaranteed sales figures five times that number.

  As Starbucks pushed its way further into the music business, Warren noted the emergence—actually, the reemergence—of a Starbucks sound. This was especially pronounced in Hear Music’s Debut series, which promised to “introduce Starbucks customers to exciting new artists.”29 To Warren, most of the new stuff sounded a bit dated. James Taylor, Indigo Girls, and Suzanne Vega, he joked, were Starbucks artists before there was a Starbucks. Each rocks, but not too hard. Each features soaring melodies and acoustic guitars. The lyrics are smart, literate, and grown-up. There is no bubble-gummy pop. “We don’t have Britney Spears,” one Starbucks music editor boasted, saying the former teen star—and devoted Starbucks customer—didn’t appeal to “discerning and curious adults.”30 Nowhere in the Starbucks mix can Warren hear loud, dissonant, politically charged sounds, either. You have to go somewhere else to get Steve Earle’s rants against the death penalty and his snide come-ons to Condoleezza Rice. Just like in David Brewster’s days, rap also can’t be heard in the new Starbucks sound—no Nas, no Jay-Z, and no Tupac. Starbucks’ Sly and the Family Stone retrospective included “Dance to the Music” and “Everyday People,” but not “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” and “Don’t Call Me Nigger Whitey.” “Very fortyish,” Warren commented on the overall Starbucks sound.