I guess these two interesting things are sort of related…
Well, folks, in a lead up to iTunes’ most popular holdouts-The Beatles-finally allowing their music to appear for purchase on the site (my spidey sense tells me that it’ll happen right before the lucrative holiday season), John Lennon’s solo work is now available. This follows Paul McCartney’s Apple/Capitol work being made available earlier this summer. The countdown to being able to download “Hey Jude” (and make Paul, Ringo, Olivia Harrison, Yoko Ono and Michael Jackson a LOT more money) begins now…
Speaking of Paul, there was quite a hubbub earlier this year when Paul jumped from Capitol, which had (aside from a stint with Columbia in the early/mid Eighties) been his recording home for 40+ years to Starbucks’ Hear Music imprint. It proved to be a smart move for Macca, as his latest album, “Memory Almost Full” has, in about 10 weeks, almost outsold what his previous albvum, “Chaos & Creation in the Backyard” has sold in two years. Of course, where one starts, others follow, and fellow legendary artists Joni Mitchell and James Taylor are now both signed to Hear Music, after lengthy stays with Warner/Reprise and Columbia, respectively. This should be an interesting litmus test, especially with a notoriously prickly artist like Joni (it strikes me as kind of strange that she would align herself with a company like Starbucks, but then again, despite her grande dame singer/songwriter status, she has complained long and hard about her treatment in the record industry). At any rate, while JT could probably sign to any label in existence and sell hundreds of thousands of albums to his fervent (and record-buying) fan base (which includes me), I scratch my head wondering whether Joni will do the promotional work that would be needed to make her album a success.
These three career artists jumping ship (along with the rumor that Madonna will be parting with Warner Brothers after a quarter century) makes me wonder who the next artist to move to Starbucks will be. And with McCartney’s success still fresh, will other companies follow suit? Is it too farfetched to think of McDonald’s or Radio Shack forming record companies and selling CDs? Who knows??
