San Antonio Express-News
Dec. 20, 2005
Meena Thiruvengadam
Starbucks, the company that has made $3 coffee the norm, is out to revolutionize San Antonio's retail music landscape.
The Seattle-based coffee chain Monday opened a Starbucks Hear Music Coffeehouse on the River Walk. The two-story, 5,100-square-foot space on Crockett Street boasts thousands of CDs and 35 media bars at which shoppers can burn custom music mixes in the time it takes to make a latte.
"We created this store so that people in San Antonio could come in and discover an incredible artist they've never heard of before," said Don MacKinnon, Starbucks' vice president for music and entertainment.
The San Antonio location, which replaces the old Starbucks on Crockett, is the company's second retail music store.
The first Starbucks Hear Music opened in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2004. A third location is scheduled to open next year in South Miami Beach, Fla.
"Music has really been part of our Starbucks culture from the very beginning, so this extension into the retail music business has really been a very natural thing for us," said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment.
Starbucks began selling CD compilations in 1995. Last year, the company co-released a Grammy award-winning album, and a 2005 album has been nominated for two Grammys.
"We're still a coffee company at heart, but we're also more than a coffee shop," Lombard said.
The Starbucks Hear Music concept was born out of the company's 1999 acquisition of a small retail music chain in Northern California.
"It's an attempt to get people into the store during non-peak hours," said Linda Bannister, a Missouri-based equity analyst with Edward Jones. "The whole strategy in the end is about driving same-store sales."
The strategy has gotten the company on the bad side of some music retailers, though. Earlier this year, retailers complained when Starbucks snagged a deal to be the first retailer to sell an acoustic version of Alanis Morisette's hit album "Jagged Little Pill."
Bannister said it's too soon to gauge the impact the Starbucks Hear Music concept will have on the company's bottom line or how investors feel about the concept.
"At this point it is really too small to move the needle and contribute to Starbucks' growth, but it is another reason for people to visit a Starbucks," she said.
Starbucks Hear Music on the River Walk carries about 10,000 CDs and more than 1 million digital music tracks. For $8.99, customers can burn a seven-song CD complete with album art and a matching label. Additional songs are 99 cents, the same price as an Apple iTunes download.
It's a bargain, said Sebastian Schoerpf, a 17-year-old foreign exchange student from Austria. The Alamo Heights High School student spent Monday looking at the River Walk and listening to Johnny Cash tunes.
"It's pretty cool to have a place where you can go drink coffee and listen to music," he said.
For others, like Ann Cooper-Akeia, the store is a place to get acquainted with the idea of making your own CDs.
"I don't know anything about downloading music or any of that, and when I think of burning music, I think of lighting a 45 on fire with a match," said the Hurricane Katrina evacuee, 56. "Here, all you have to do is push a button to make a CD. That I can do."
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