Starbucks offers self-service CD burning
But there she was, stylus in hand, scrolling through the rock collection on a touch-screen computer at Starbucks. She listened to Blues Traveler and Aerosmith before she considered burning a CD.
"I'm from a small farming community," said Jaquish of Sunnyside, Yakima County, "and this is really downtown."
Starbucks yesterday unveiled Hear Music media bars at a few Seattle stores in a nationwide rollout that will reach Austin, Texas, later this month and other cities next year. The self-service screens — some attached to overstuffed chairs, others propped on top of eating bars — allow customers to create customized and full-length CDs from a list of some 150,000 songs.
The service costs $8.99 for the first seven songs and 99 cents for each additional track. It will be available at 15 stores in Seattle, Everett and Redmond by the end of the month and at 30 stores in Austin in November. Each location will have three to six touch-screen computers, where customers use a stylus to browse through music by genre, artist or music collection.
The service is offered through Hear Music, which Starbucks bought in 1999. The subsidiary creates CD and music programming for Starbucks stores. The division is best known for co-producing the album "Ray Charles: Genius Loves Company" — the final recording for the legendary artist. The album reached the No. 2 spot on the Billboard Top 200 charts the first week of sales.
Chairman Howard Schultz said yesterday that Starbucks is in the music business because music is important to its customers.
After Starbucks presented the media bar at an analysts conference last week, some questioned whether the CD-burning stations would detract from the cafe experience and from the company's core business — selling specialty coffee.
The media bars should add "incremental" revenue and profit, Schultz said. Some analysts, however, believe the service is designed to bring more customers into Starbucks cafes during the afternoon and evening hours. Starbucks has focused in recent years on bringing in customers after the morning rush. It began to offer wireless Internet access at thousands of stores and beefed up its lunch menu in some locations.
In January, the company will offer Chantico, a European-style chocolate drink and more decadent desserts, aimed at luring customers into stores in the evening.
"That has been a goal for a while to spread out those revenues during the day," said McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Dan Geiman.
Michael Gartenberg, research director for Jupiter Research, said Starbucks is the first retailer to offer CD burning in stores. "This is a very nascent market, and there's going to be more than one distribution venue where consumers will purchase and access [music]," Gartenberg said.
Cherri Trusheim, 31, of Seattle said she walked over to the Olive Way store after hearing about the media bars on the TV news.
"We've been here for two and a half hours," Trusheim said as her partner, Sarah Littlefield, 36, made a CD. "It's very addictive."
Littlefield had put Billy Idol and Ratt on her '80s compilation CD, but the computer crashed after she added a song from Styx.
"It's the world's best '80s CD, and [the computer] froze," lamented Littlefield as she waited for an employee to help her fix the machine. "I'm crushed."
Brendan Scanlan, 33, dropped in to the same Starbucks to make a rock and blues CD. Scanlan said he usually doesn't download music on his computer, but the media bar seemed easy enough to use.
"Maybe I'll make more," Scanlan said, pausing. "Maybe I'll make this a really expensive habit."
Monica Soto Ouchi: 206-515-5632
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