Starbucks drinks and onion rings. More »
Say goodbye to those days when you could pick up an Adele CD with your Caramel Frappucino: Starbucks will dump almost all of its in-store music offerings over the next three months, according to sources. More »
Say goodbye to those days when you could pick up an Adele CD with your Caramel Frappucino: Starbucks will dump almost all of its in-store music offerings over the next three months, according to sources. More »
As may you may have heard, Sonic Youth has decided to skip the traditional best-of route, instead getting famous friends like Mike D, Radiohead and Eddie Vedder to pick less familiar, more personal choices like “100%,” “Kool Thing,” and “Teen Age Riot.” Only six of the fifteen older titles selected have never received a video treatment, and one of those is “Expressway To Yr Skull.” This basically leaves “Stones,” “Tuff Gnarl,” “Rain On Tin,” “Tom Violence” and “The World Looks Red” as genuinely surprising tracks to find on a SY comp, so thank you Allison Anders, Dave Eggers, Flea, Gus Van Sant, and Chloe Sevigny. Hits Are For Squares? Wouldn’t a more accurate title have been Starpower? Let’s attempt to deduce the curators’ logic.
Starbucks is turning over the day-to-day management of its record label, Hear Music, to the Concord Group, and Hear Music head Ken Lombard has left the company “to pursue other business interests,” according to a statement from the coffee conglomerate. More »
Although Starbucks has made itself one of the most powerful music retailers in the country–one in which “prestige” albums can be sold at full retail price, refueling the dreams of every record executive in Burbank and Manhattan–they have largely flown under the music media radar. The Hear Music label has received most of the attention by grabbing high profile artists like Paul McCartney, but the nuts and bolts of what gets into the racks next to the cinnamon swirl coffee cake has been more of a mystery. The New York Times, providing a service possibly no one asked for but me, looked into the balance between moving units and retaining credibility. The shift for Starbucks has been from a coffee retailer with a few discs that could still seem hand-selected, to twenty discs that seem more like the new release rack at Borders. Let’s face it: no one’s going to believe claims of quality control screening when the second James Blunt disc is a featured selection.
Carly Simon is going to put out her next album through Starbucks’ Hear Music label, with This Kind Of Love slated for release on April 29. If only they’d made this announcement two days ago during the mandated Starbucks closings! More »
Starbucks announced its latest musical acquisition today, a soprano sax player born one Kenneth Gorelick, who will be dropping his bazillionth album at Starbucks locations and brick-and-mortar joints on Feb. 5. More »
Starbucks is going to give away cards that can be redeemed for songs at the iTunes Music Store for five weeks beginning Oct. 2. More »
Starbucks is going to give away cards that can be redeemed for songs at the iTunes Music Store for five weeks beginning Oct. 2. More »
