Starbucks and the New Age of Censorship

Excerpt adapted from Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks by Bryant Simon (University of California Press, October 2009)

In April of 2005, Bruce Springsteen turned down the volume and released the acoustic set, Devils and Dust. Like the best of his post–Born in the USA work, this is a modest collection of portraits of snake-bitten people facing long odds and even meaner circumstances. In one song, “Reno”, a sad, desolate man on the wrong side of American Dream 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 perhaps by the content warning on the label, or by the song’s dark tone and painful realism, Starbucks reportedly refused to sell the CD in its stores. When confronted, company officials said they didn’t have rack room for another disc.

Book: Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks

Author: Bryant Simon

Publisher: University of California Press

Publication date: 2009-10

Length: 320 pages

Format: Hardcover

Price: $25.95

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/features_art/s/simon-everythingbutcoffee-c.jpgNot long after Starbucks announced its decision, Springsteen stood alone on a Philadelphia stage without the E Street and joked to the crowd 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?

Almost from its start in Seattle in 1971, Starbucks sold music. But after it hit it big with Ray Charles’ “Genius Loves Company” in 2005 – the coffee purveyor sold almost eight million units of this CD, all by the way at full price – the company moved headlong into the music business. This move coincided with Sam Goody and Tower closing stores and declaring bankruptcy.

These changes in the retail sector quickly turned Starbucks into an increasingly important outlet for CDs sales. Trying to capitalize on the moment and its faithful boomer clientele, Starbucks set out to get older sounds and artists – Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Vann Morrison — back into circulation. But the company also decided to turn its audience on to undiscovered artists. This was about the idea of discovery and about how, then, discovery could sell the familiar.

As Starbucks boasted on its “company fact sheet”, the firm offered “customers the opportunity to discover quality entertainment in a fun, convenient way.” (Emphasis added.) As much as the music itself, Starbucks marketed this idea of discovery – the idea that it would give its customers something new, something a bit uncommon, something they could talk about over coffee, without them having to do too much exploring on their own.

Over and over, the brand’s music choices, and the copy that surrounded them, highlighted the promise of discovery, but they were, as the Springsteen story suggested, more about the mainstream than the edges, more about the performance of new-ness than the substance of new-ness, and more about riskless and reassuring art than risky or disturbing art.

Before 2005, not many people outside of New York City —or even in New York—had heard of Antigone Rising, a melodious and twangy Eagles-inflected, VH1-ready – this is when the station still played music — girl group. Nor had many heard any tunes from the band’s five previous indie label records.

Someone at Starbucks, however, liked Antigone Rising’s familiar sound and slightly boho chic, though certainly not alienating, Greenwich Village image, so this person signed the quintet up as one of the company’s new artists. Soon the band’s live acoustic set, From the Ground Up, appeared in all of the company’s US stores and played over baristas’ bright talk of tall mocha lattes nonstop for months on end.

That was the post-Tower records, somewhat post-radio marketing power Starbucks possessed. It played the songs it chose to 44 million customers per week. While critics panned the Antigone Rising record, calling it “vanilla”, “adult contemporary fluff”, “with mild intensity and just a hint of acidity”, it still sold 70,000 units—an astonishing achievement for a largely unknown band that didn’t tour or get a lot of traditional radio airtime. Starbucks customers bought most of these CDs.

New bands – especially ones without critical acclaim or access to the Disney Channel – rarely register sales figures like these anymore. But everyone in the music business, including an industry stalwart like Paul McCartney, paid attention when they did.

The “Wal-Mart of Hip”

The “Wal-Mart of Hip”

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.” (“Sir Paul’s Flat White Album”, Kathy McCabe, [London] Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2007) When his new CD, Memory Almost Full, debuted in May, it got played all day long at 10,000 Starbucks stores in 20 countries around the world.

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. (ibid)

When after 2005 or so, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and other musical heritage acts got on the coffee company’s CD racks, 20 to 30 percent of their total sales come from Starbucks. The numbers, though, were even higher for newer artists like Antigone Rising.

Just like Paul McCartney, 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 was like there is a “new cute girl that everyone wants to take to the dance.” (“Coffee and Starbucks Create a Potent Mix”, Steven Gray and Ethan Smith, Wall Street Journal, 19 July 19, 2005)

Bruce Warren, a programming manager from Philadelphia’s taste-maker station, WXPN, has watched this courtship up-close. “Manna heaven as another distribution point”—that’s how Warren described Starbucks in 2007. “I have conversations with musicians and A&R guys all the time,” he said to me, “and all of them are obsessed with getting their records into Starbucks… They want their stuff to sell,” he declared stating an obvious but important fact.

New artists are especially fixated on the coffee company. Ninety-eight percent of all CDs, Warren estimated, sell fewer than 10,000 copies. A spot on Starbucks’ racks, however, guarantees sales figures five times that number for unknown bands.

As Starbucks pushed its way further into the music business, Warren noted the emergence—really, 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.”

To Warren, most of the new stuff sounded a lot like the old stuff. Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Indigo Girls, and Susanne 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.” (ibid, Gray and Smith)

But nowhere in the Starbucks mix could Warren (or anyone else) hear loud, dissonant, politically charged sounds. You have to go somewhere else to get Steve Earle’s rants against the death penalty and his snide come-ons to Condoleezza Rice. Rap also isn’t part of the 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 when we talked on the overall Starbucks sound, adding, “very white.”

Music critic Mark Kemp noticed what Warren noticed. But he thought the Springsteen incident turned Starbucks into a “corporate scum weed” and, even worse, the “Wal-Mart of Hip.” (“Wal-Mart of Hip”, Mark Kemp, Harp Magazine, July/August 2005) Like the behemoth from Bentonville, he felt like the coffee shop from Seattle used its corporate might to dictate taste and morality.

Fellow music critic David Hadju went a couple of steps farther in a condemnation. In a blistering New Republic piece he likened Starbucks to the Soviet Union and its soundscape of state-dictated music. (“The Music of Starbucks”, New Republic, 7 August 2006)

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 oversized, overpriced drinks and fairly predictable tunes, and to do that in the postneed economic order, it had to manufacture images and feelings, in this case the feelings 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 after 2005 at its 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, both in terms of production and distribution. It looks like we have more choices when we actually have fewer.

. He blogs at Redroom.com