10 buck Starbuck CDs
p2pnet.net News:- If you’re happy with $9 and up to burn a CD with mp3 tracks, Starbucks is waiting for you.
The company says it’ll add DIY touch-screen burner kiosks to 30 stores in Austin and 15 in Seattle by the end of the month.
"But the Seattle-based coffee retailer eventually plans to add the new ‘music bars’ nationwide as part of its plan to leverage its well-known name and chain of more than 8,300 stores to reach beyond coffee beans for profits," continues the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
An album or custom-made CD with seven songs will cost $9.00 and each song after that will cost, you guessed it, $1.
And the selections will presumably be from the usual Big Four suspects who are doing well, selling the same tracks over and over again to various corporate music sites and ’services,’ who then try to retail the mp3s for $1 a go in North America, and for a lot more in parts of Europe.
About two years ago, Starbucks started offering wireless Internet service for customers for about $10 a day and Starbucks President Orin Smith characterized the music and wireless business as the first of many "concierge services" Starbucks eventually hopes to offer at its stores, adds the story.
Wal-Mart is said to be haggling with the Big Four record label cartel to sell CDs, also for $10 each.
But these will have ‘real’ tracks, not mp3s which are fine for portable players and the like but which aren’t a lot of good for high fidelity systems.
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See:-
$9 and up – New at Starbucks: Burn a CD, October 15, 2004
Wal-Mart – $10 music CDs?, p2pnet, October 14, 2004
October 17th, 2004 at 7:13 am
I think its great that the industry approves the sale of custom mix CDs, but a burned CD-R costing more than a factory-pressed CD-with-all-the-trimmings?
This scheme reeks of the industry’s usual “take ‘em for all you can” mentality.
Ever go into a large store such as Best Buy and notice how much floor space all those CDs take up? Commercial floor space does not come cheap. And imagine all the employee labor it takes to not only keep it organized and catalogued, but to help customers find things?
That’s a big expense these made-to-order CDs will be saving by the store not having to devote and maintain a vast amount of floor and shelf space to pre-packaged CDs which may or may not ever sell.
So with all the money that they save by burning CDs on-the-fly, don’t you think they might pass some of the savings on to their customers? Like maybe offer a $5 all-you-can-stuff-on-it CD?