Whole Foods Adds CD’s To Market Mix

I was in While Foods the other day and they were now selling CD’s.  Not just New Age background music, but Crosby, Stills and Nash.  Just like Starbucks the selection was very limited and targeted towards their yuppie customer base, but here was my natural foods supermarket acting as a gate keeper to music…

The possibilities are endless: in store concerts, a broadcast that combines music, cooking and health in-stores, on the web and even on satellite radio, compilation CD’s.  Some smart music marketer needs to jump on this NOW.  Pianist George Winston broke with the help of New Age book stores and Putamayo popularized their great world music compilations via racks in local natural foods stores.

Music commentator Bob Lefsetz asked in a recent newsletter, "…how is it that Starbucks and Whole Foods are the new record stores? On one hand they’re appealing to people who’ve REJECTED record stores. I mean if I don’t go in them anymore, how about my adult contemporaries?…"

"…But I scratch my head. If you buy a CD, you’re not hip. And believe me, the one thing the customers of Starbucks and Whole Foods want to be is hip."

"MAYBE if Starbucks opened up a downloading station, where you could just plug in your iPod and get the CD at a discount, people would partake just to BE cool."

"Imagine it. Everybody would show up at Starbucks with their iPod, as a badge of honor. They’d b.s. like insiders, like Benz drivers, as they waited in line to fill up. And then they’d tell all their buds that they downloaded an album at the coffee emporium."

"But to provide something like this would be to invest in the future. And, although they don’t want to go out of business, the labels are not INVESTING in the future."

OK labels – or iTunes, Napster and Yahoo – are your listening? Or are you just sitting in your office pissed that your A&R department didn’t sign Coldplay and  make your job easy?

Subscribe to Bob Lefsetz’s newsletter at www.lefsetz.com

Bruce Houghton