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Yesterday news broke that Carly Simon filed a lawsuit against Starbucks claiming the coffee giant failed to market her last album, This Kind of Love, properly. Today Starbucks’ vice president of brand content Chris Bruzzo responded to Simon’s legal action, telling Rolling Stone that the company went out of its way to cater to Simon’s requests.
“We offered Carly Simon CDs in every store that we offered Paul McCartney CDs,” Bruzzo tells RS, citing the most noteworthy Hear Music exclusive, Memory Almost Full. “We put This Kind of Love into every store that sells music, which is almost every one of our stores. We’re talking about more than 7,000 stores had a supply of Carly Simon CD at launch.”
Most CDs stay on Starbucks shelves for four weeks, but even with sales slumping, Bruzzo says the company agreed to keep This Kind of Love stocked for six weeks, plus an additional six weeks in markets where Simon’s management felt the singer had a greater audience. “Her team said, ‘You know, she’s got a really strong fan base in the Northeast, and in fact, she’s also touring there… We’d love for you guys to extend it in New York and Boston,’ ” Bruzzo says. “Now this was above and beyond anything that we had committed or were required to do, but we decided to do it anyway,” adding that stores in those markets stocked This Kind of Love until September, well after its release on April 29th, 2008.
Simon told the New York Times she blames Starbucks for the album’s disappointing sales, but Bruzzo insists Nielsen SoundScan numbers prove that Starbucks actually helped move copies of This Kind of Love, an album that wasn’t exclusive to Starbucks. By the first week of June, Starbucks had sold between 37,000 to 40,000 copies o...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily