Starbucks: better than radio?
Updated on 05 June 2007
Can Starbucks' new record label give recording artists better air time than radio?
Sir Paul McCartney seems to think so. His latest album, Memory Almost Full, is the first original release on the coffee giant's new music label Hear Music.
In return for signing to the fledgling label, Sir Paul will be rewarded with a stupendous amount of airtime all around the world: today his new record is being played on a loop all day long in over 10,000 Starbucks stores across 29 countries.
Starbucks estimates that for this 'global listening event' alone, six million customers will get to hear the album. And it'll be on sale in-store too.
So once you've finished your skinny frappaccino, you can take it home and listen to it for all eternity.
The album - supposedly an anagram of 'For My Soulmate LLM' (a tribute to his late wife Linda Louise McCartney) - has received pretty good reviews so far. According to critics, it's romantic and dreamy eyed.
But the motive behind signing up to Starbucks' new label must be anything but.
Dwindling album sales are no longer the preserve of the aging rocker; these days the music industry has to recoup its money through touring and merchandising.
Records are just a marketing tool, barely lucrative.
So, after being disappointed by the limited sales achieved by his previous Grammy nominated album, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, it's no surprise that McCartney has decided to get as wide and diverse an audience for his new release as possible.
No-brainer
So, is Starbucks better than radio? Well, it can certainly deliver in terms of listening figures.
According to stats from Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research Limited), which measures audiences for the radio industry, in an average week around 45 million people tune into radio stations in the UK for at lease five minutes. And of those, the sort of stations that might play a bit of Macca are -are a fraction: Radio 2, for example, gets just over 13m listeners per week.
Compare this to the amount of listeners (albeit forced for the want of a cup of coffee) garnered by Starbucks in an average week - also 45 million - and the decision to go with the coffee giant's label is something of a no-brainer.
After the first promotional day of back-to-back Macca, he'll get airtime alongside other Hear Music names on the in-store radio-style mix CDs.
But, given that the likes of Radio 1 don't tend to play artists like McCartney anymore, the kind of eclectic audience Starbucks can offer is a definite boon.
What's in it for Starbucks?
So it's clear what's in it for Sir Paul - he gets his slice of radio coverage and sales at all the usual music retailers and online stores, on top of a big healthy plug at Starbucks stores the world over. But what's in it for Starbucks?
Given that the music industry regards albums as more marketing tool than cash cow, can Starbucks really expect to turn a profit from producing records?
Hear Music is confident that it can do just that. It describes the artists it will produce as "select" and "hand-picked"; it's going for quality rather than quantity. And it says that past experience shows its effectiveness in the sales department.
When Madeleine Peyroux's album was released in stores there was a spike in record sales. Two months after its release in the US Starbucks accounted for more than 30 per cent of sales.
However although the listening figures and the mixed demographic are attractive to recording artists, Mike McGuire, media analyst for Gartner, points out that most retailers would avoid an entire day of Paul McCartney on a loop "for no other reason than not wanting to drive their workers insane".
