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ShareExcerpt 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.
Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks
Bryant Simon
(University of California Press; US: Oct 2009)
Not 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.
