A Vente Latte And A Nouveau Dylan, Please!

from the this-is-the-new-retail? dept

theodp writes “Wanna buy counterculture legend Bob Dylan’s new CD? For the next 18 months, you’ll only be able to do so at Starbucks.” We wrote in the past about Starbucks’ success in selling a Ray Charles’ CD, so this is just an expansion on that concept, combined with Dylan’s weird/goofy experiment in doing a Victoria’s Secret commercial and offering an exclusive album via their stores for a period of time. However, it seems odd and a bit pointless — especially in this day and age — for any musician to agree to have an album only be available in one store. Allowing albums to be sold in these stores makes sense, but the exclusivity seems strange. It also means (most likely) that such songs are not going to be available at any of the legitimate download stores — meaning people will have more incentive to go looking to download unauthorized copies.


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Comments on “A Vente Latte And A Nouveau Dylan, Please!”

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4 Comments
Jason Scott (user link) says:

No Subject Given

“However, it seems odd and a bit pointless — especially in this day and age — for any musician to agree to have an album only be available in one store.”

What’s that? I can’t hear you over the sounds of all that money being dumped out of the Starbuck’s truck into Dylan’s lap.

Dylan hates bootlegs. I’m sure this was great; get a ton of money for something he doesn’t care for.

Mark Fox (user link) says:

Can lead to boycotts

It also angers your other retailers. In Canada music stores such as HMV are threatening to remove all music by Alanis Morissette from their shelves if her label signs a deal with Starbucks for it to have exclusive rights to her next album.
A similar thing happened when the Rolling Stones signed a deal with the FutureShop electronics chain.
Starbucks must be paying the label enough to make up for these loses.

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