Starbucks Serves Up Digital Music

Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

Starbucks will begin rolling out next week the in-store CD burning service it announced in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard back in March.

Starbucks will install what it calls Hear Music media bars at 45 of its coffeehouses in Seattle and Austin, Texas between next week and the end of November, the first phase of a national rollout that will continue in 2005, the company will announce Thursday.

The Hear Music media bars will feature the necessary hardware and software, provided by HP, for customers to search Starbucks' digital song library, choose and listen to tracks, and burn them to a CD. CDs whose song lists are compiled by customers will cost $8.99 for the first seven tracks and $0.99 per additional track.

Customers will also be able to purchase full-length albums at prices that are similar to what conventional retail outlets charge. They will be able to burn these albums off the digital song library or buy them in the standard shrink-wrapped format if they are in stock at the store.

Starbucks implemented the first Hear Music media bar in March in a Santa Monica, California coffee house, and starting next week will put them in 15 of its stores in Seattle, where Starbucks is based. Starting October 25, Starbucks will begin installing Hear Music media bars in 30 of its coffee houses in Austin, Texas.

In addition to selecting and burning tracks, customers will also be able to listen to entire songs and albums at the Hear Music media bars from the library, which has now some 150,000 songs. They will also be able to print album artwork to go with their burned CDs.

When it announced this service in March, Starbucks planned to begin its rollout in 10 of its Seattle stores during the spring, which ended in late June, meaning those original plans got pushed back about four months. Also in March, Starbucks indicated its digital music library had "hundreds of thousands of songs," but it now is apparently making a more conservative claim, saying the library has "more than 150,000 songs."

HP Hardware

The HP equipment powering the media bars includes tablet PCs, workstations, printers, and networking wares. Customers operate the service via touch-screen-equipped tablet PCs and headphones.

Specifically, each Starbucks location will have several HP Tablet PC TC1100s with headphones and without keyboards: customers will use a stylus to interact with the machines' user interface via a touch screen monitor. The PCs will feature a core custom-made application which will let the user search for music, listen to tracks, and burn CDs. Meanwhile, the media bars will also have an HP xw4100 workstation for the actual creation and burning of the CDs, while the printing of CD art is done on an HP Business Inkjet 9670 Printer. HP's services unit developed the system's custom software on a Microsoft platform.

Starbucks believes the Hear Music media bars will strike a chord with its patrons, which the coffee giant has found tend to be music enthusiasts: more than 80 percent of Starbucks customers listen to music CDs weekly and more than 50 percent have purchased between one and six conventional CDs in the past six months, according to a survey conducted on Starbucks' behalf by Evans Research between September and October 2004.

Starbucks feels its Hear Music media bars will appeal not only to its tech-savvy customers, but also to those who aren't yet proficient at downloading digital music off the Internet and listening to it on an MP3 player. More than 50 percent of Starbucks customers never listen to music on an MP3 player or portable digital music device, and 36 percent never download music from the Internet, according to the survey.

Starbucks has more than 8500 coffeehouses in North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim.