Everything but the Coffee (24 page)

“When I saw Hear Music the first time,” Howard Schultz told a reporter as he looked back on why he purchased the company, “it was clear that they had cracked the code on the sense of discovery that music should have.” A couple of years earlier, he commented on the deal by saying, “The fact that Hear Music had elevated its status from a record store to an editor was compelling.”
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Hear Music’s Don MacKinnon explained the relationship a little differently. He saw the acquisition as a way to expand the role he started playing at Williams College onto a bigger stage. With Starbucks’ commercial reach, he imagined Hear Music as “that friend in college down the hall who played great music and made great mixes, and turned you on to something. A lot of us feel we don’t have that friend anymore.”
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Bing first met David Brewster, later a Starbucks sound architect, in the mid-1990s when they both lived in Boston. At the time, Brewster worked in the marketing department at Houghton Mifflin, and Bing did the same at Rounder Records. “We would run into each other at trade shows,” Bing told me, “and since he was a big music fan, and I liked books, we would introduce each other to stuff.” As the decade came to a close, Brewster had had kids and wanted to move closer to his family in the Pacific Northwest. One day, he called Bing and asked him if he knew anyone out there. “I gave him Tim Jones’s information,” Bing remembers. By then, Jones had moved from behind the coffee counter to the Hear Music offices, managing compilations and in-store programming. Eventually, Brewster got a job with Starbucks and helped to run its first,
short-lived foray into the book business. When that folded, he went to work on the music side of Hear Music and stayed there until 2004.

“All the music decisions,” Brewster outlined for me over the phone, “were pretty deliberate.” Just like at the Hear Music stores and in its catalogs, the idea was to have limited selections. By not carrying too many titles, Starbucks suggested that each CD really earned its place at the table because it offered something special and unique.
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At first, this was pretty much how it was. Brewster and his colleagues looked for music laced with an “air of sophistication, as well as an aspect of discovery, often rooted in jazz.”
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“Why jazz? What does it say?” I asked.

“Jazz,” he answered, “is viewed as the archetypical sound of the coffeehouse—an urban coffeehouse, as opposed to a college coffeehouse with peanuts on the floor.”

But Starbucks didn’t play just any kind of jazz. In the mid-to late 1990s, Brewster recalled, customers heard postbop and cool jazz, music positioned squarely between the riotous postwar sounds of Charlie Parker and the frenzied fusion of Miles Davis’s 1969 album
Bitches Brew
. As Brewster explained, the tunes could “not [be] too challenging, but not too vanilla, either, [and] not too old sounding like Benny Goodman.”

After several successful collaborations with the famed postbop, cool jazz label Blue Note in the 1990s, which included the introduction of Blue Blend Coffee, Starbucks “exhibited a growing confidence about how [it] should represent itself to customers,” Brewster said. From jazz, the company moved to Delta and urban blues, putting out, in the words of one reviewer, several compilations that “dusted off some ancient jewels and mined new diamonds.”
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After that, Brewster and his colleagues gently steered the company toward world music. Playing Buena Vista Social Club in its stores, Starbucks helped to drive sales of the group’s 1997 break-through collaboration with Ry Cooder to unseen heights for Cuban music in the United States. It followed up this success by releasing Café Cubana—a “flavorful blend” of artists from Havana and Miami that promised patrons “a musical adventure.” Between 1999 and 2001,
Starbucks joined forces with Peter Gabriel and Real World Records to bring to the coffee shops and the mainstream the synthetic sounds of Afro Celt Sound System, a U.K. band that blended Irish tin whistles with techno and traditional drumming, and the deeply spiritual singing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a celebrated Pakistani performer who would go on to record with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. Overlapping with these moves, Brewster and his crew got in touch with Yo-Yo Ma, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Sheryl Crow, and the Rolling Stones. Following that early Hear Music model, each star assembled an “Artist’s Choice” collection, usually a wildly eclectic one, of his or her favorite songs. “As we went along,” Brewster told me about this period, “we deliberately began to get more diverse.”

As Brewster and his fellow sound architects played new sounds, Starbucks customers got the sense of discovery many wanted. Every once in a while, they came away from the stores feeling like they had uncovered something new, just like I had on those afternoons in the record store with Bing. Brewster knew that the sense of discovery enhanced the brand. For him, it was like filling two roles at once: he got to turn people on to cool music (and get paid for it) and create latte loyalty all at the same time. At this point, however, Starbucks executives saw CDs sales as a bonus, not as the music project’s main focus.

By no means would Brewster and his Hear Music colleagues play just anything. Trying to create the feeling of discovery, they chose some music and tossed aside other tunes. “What [was] out,” he explained in 2003, was “Top 40 and country. Most classical, too, though we have done some opera.”
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In the mid-1990s, Starbucks offered an album by Kenny G.
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Not long after, the saxophonist apparently lost his place in the stores. This was a hard call for Brewster. Howard Schultz palled around with Kenny G, who in turn bought a pile of the company’s stock. On one occasion the chairman pressed—gently—the Hear Music folks to carry his friend’s CDs. Brewster and his crew refused. “He’s not authentic,” Brewster explained to me. “We wanted this authentic tradition, and he is not from the tradition.” Brewster preferred artists who
needed a leg up. That wasn’t Kenny G, either. He didn’t need any help, nor did he “do much for the larger culture,” Brewster said.

Brewster won’t play any coffee songs, either. “We got pitched all the time by artists,” he chuckled, “who wrote songs about coffee . . .. That was too clichéd.” Instead, he looked for music that went with the brand’s vision of itself as a purveyor of hard-to-find, handmade, artisanal, authentic products.
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Again and again, Brewster sent jazz, blues, and world beat tracks from corporate headquarters to play over Starbucks’ in-store sound systems. “African American music,” he said to me, was “a sound and a feel of what a coffeehouse should represent.” Here, I’m guessing, Brewster was talking about the freedom and experimentation displayed at beatnik coffee joints. At these places and at Starbucks, the soundtrack reached back to a long, complex tradition in American culture perhaps best expressed (meaning with all the contradictions left in) by Norman Mailer in his classic, revealing, and disturbing essay, “The White Negro.” In this insightful window into postwar thinking and neurosis, the one-time bad boy of American letters portrayed African Americans as the freest Americans. In their poverty and rural ways, they became to him the most authentic and liberated of the nation’s people. As the quintessential outsiders, African Americans, in Mailer’s cloudy vision, lived the freest lives. Blues, jazz, and R&B—black music—allowed whites to experience the liberating world of blackness as some of them—and Mailer—imagined it.
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Listening to Muddy Waters sing the blues, wailing, moaning, and preening, let the audience believe it could feel this romanticized (and projected) world of blackness—this world of honest struggle, sex, freedom, and the true promise of America.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The closings left boomers, still wedded to the album format, with fewer places to get their old music and discover new music.