Coffee and CD? Not in Starbucks, please. Photograph: Sarah Lee
These are, as we keep hearing, tough times for old-school record companies. But, falling profits and underperforming superstars notwithstanding, cappuccino peddlers Starbucks have chosen this month to launch their own label. Unlike a previous arrangement that let the chain sell other labels' CDs in its shops, Starbucks plan to start signing their own artists, in direct competition with other companies. And, according to American press reports, the potential first signing is Paul McCartney.
That may be easier said than done, given that both Parlophone Records and McCartney's own publicists said today that they believe he's still signed to Parlophone, his UK label since 1962. But even if he were free, would an old 60s idealist like Macca really plight his troth to a company that's a byword for multi-national expansionism? Furthermore, the man is still a working musician who refused a Lifetime Achievement Brit Award because he considered it a prize for old fogeys. Is he likely to want his next record to be sold by the home of squashy leather sofas and cosy predictability?
But if McCartney won't sign, other major names will. After all, Starbucks can already claim to be a successful record retailer - sales of albums such as Ray Charles' Genius Loves Company, released by soul/jazz house Concord Records but only sold at Starbucks, have proved that people aren't averse to buying CDs in coffee shops. And there you go - we'll soon be graced by a label that views music as an adjunct to hot-beverage-drinking.
Saying all that, I'm not virulently anti-Starbucks, and I daresay there aren't many Guardian readers who don't occasionally succumb - grudgingly or not - to the call of a Frappuccino or a Marshmallow Twizzle (an outrageously priced blob designed to be soaked in coffee). But to have them branch out into making records, which would theoretically make them a force in the music industry, is just wrong.
