Everything but the Coffee by Bryant Simon Read Free Book Online Page B

Heaven, the Shangri-Las, and Solomon Burke.
    Bing became, in a sense, my music editor. He picked through the record racks and chose the tunes. I handed him this role because I trusted him. I trusted his taste and judgment, I trusted that he wanted to extend my musical reach, and I trusted that he believed that music, just on its own, could make our lives better—more fun, more soulful, more meaningful, and more melodious. From there, I trusted him about other things. I read books that he suggested, went to movies that he recommended, and saw plays that he had heard about or seen. Bing served as a culture broker for me in those days.
    Through Bing, I discovered new music and the vocabulary to talk about it. I could then take that knowledge and share it (or show it off) to others. As I did, I gained cultural capital myself. I appeared like someone who had valuable insider information on music, and I gained, in some people’s eyes, a bit of esteem because of this knowledge. I knew something that they didn’t know; I could help them make a discovery. Knowledge and information have currency in the postneed economy—people who know stuff have value, and we gravitate toward them to get their tips and insights, and then we absorb what they teach us and make it our own (sometimes with, sometimes without, attribution). This informal transfer of new knowledge goes on all the time, and it’s exactly what Starbucks sought to commodify through selling music, and later books, packaged as discovery.
    PACKAGING THE NEW
    To his friends, Don MacKinnon played the same role as Bing did in my life. As a Williams College undergraduate, he spent hours making mixed tapes for his dorm mates. From there, he went to Harvard Business School. When he graduated with an MBA in 1990, he joined with two other classmates to start Hear Music, a kind of commercialization of his college role as the guy who turned others on to new music. What Hear Music really sold was cultural capital through discovery—the value of the chance to learn something new and then show it to others.
    At the outset, MacKinnon and his associates ran the company as a mail-order catalog. They introduced people to largely unknown regional acts like Texas legends Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Along with these releases, Hear Music put out compilations of a number of talented singer-songwriters—symbols of authenticity in the age of hair bands—like Nanci Griffith, Ricki Lee Jones, and Bonnie Raitt. From there, Hear Music opened record stores in Berkeley, Chicago, and a few places in between. Bing explained to me, “These were tastemaker shops,” forerunners to Amazon and hundreds of Internet retailers, “that used the ‘if you like . . . Cowboy Junkies or Lyle Lovett . . . , you will love [fill in the blank]”—something, he added, “you can see in today’s Starbucks marketing.” Hear Music offered a limited stock of products (say, one thousand records), and the staff—usually people who knew music—felt a certain ownership over these artists. They embraced the idea that it was their right, their duty, to turn people on to
their
artists and
their
songs. “Nothing came cheap at Hear Music,” Bing added. Most CDs sold for the full manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Like the value proposition Starbucks offered in its earliest days—pay them and you get a little of their coffee knowledge—people paid a premium to Hear Music to gain access to the staff’s musical expertise and a chance at discovering something new. 5
    When a store plays music, though not Muzak or mainstream pop, it signals that it is a place for discovery. Less commercial music went hand in glove with the idea of the twentieth-century coffeehouse experience. At those smoky, basement beatific places, scratchy jazz and blues records played during the day, and folk musicians strummed their guitars and blew into harmonicas at night. When Howard Schultz opened Il Giornale, he played opera. At one of