Cool(?) Music at Starbucks
My former classmate from music school, Davis Wilson, has some insight into the music sold near the counter at Starbucks across America. The selected artists actually WERE cool…until they were sold at Starbucks. The entire post is here.
The instant an artist’s album hits the CD rack at Starbucks is the death knell for that artist being actually cool. As I’ve argued before, coolness depends partially on exclusivity, but tripling your album sales and selling to the countless pumpkin-spice-latte-drinking yuppies with corporate jobs is anything but exclusive. When all of America knows Lyle Lovett makes good music, well, he can still make good music, but he doesn’t win any underground, sophisticated, acquired-taste points for it. And neither do you if you buy his albums. Even if you already had a Lyle Lovett album years before, Starbucks has devalued the currency via inflation, and how will anyone know that you listened to Lyle beforehand without Starbucks telling you he was any good?
Leave a Reply