Starbucks sells ‘Genius’ with the joe

Ray Charles’ “Genius Loves Company” is more than just the prohibitive favorite in Sunday’s contest for album-of-the-year Grammy. It’s a model for how to reach a complacent adult music market and rival the youth market and its technology savvy.

Better still, it shows boutique and indie record labels how to make use of the kind of marketing and distribution muscle that’s typically available only to the corporate giants and their various sublabels.

The key, as specialty label Concord Records discovered, was to put “Genius” smack in front of baby boomers’ faces as they ordered espresso machiattos and iced mochas at Starbucks coffee shops. A few thousand tons of joe later, you have one of the year’s biggest hits.

Coulda been the caffeine.

But Concord president Glen Barros says it was a carefully planned case of niche marketing: The label had already inked a deal with Starbucks before it had even signed Mr. Charles. (Starbucks had been, and still is, distributing “Artist’s Choice” compilations but hadn’t experimented with a new recording.)

“We were looking for a very high-profile recording that we could make a big splash with,” Mr. Barros explains. “Genius” was chosen as the ideal test vehicle to target adult music consumers, whom Mr. Barros believes are “underserved.”

Billboard magazine senior writer Brian Garrity says “Genius” showed that “if you do the right programming in the right context, you can still get adult consumers to buy CDs.”

Mr. Garrity agrees that older consumers aren’t finding nourishment at big-box retail stores, such as Target and Best Buy, where most music is bought today. “The consumer of the Ray Charles record isn’t necessarily being catered to in those environments,” he says.

“Genius Loves Company,” which is up for 10 Grammy awards, would have done respectable business on its own, but it wouldn’t have been the phenomenon it was if not for the Starbucks crossover: Fully 30 percent of the album’s 3 million sales have come through the coffee retail giant.

To be sure, Mr. Garrity points out, other factors contributed to “Genius’ ” success — Mr. Charles’ untimely death, for one; the Oscar-contender biopic “Ray,” for another. Then there was the value-added star power of the album, a set of duets with singers such as Elton John, Norah Jones and James Taylor, adult-contemporary favorites all.

It was a “perfect storm” for new Ray Charles product, Mr. Garrity says.

Nevertheless, Concord believed it had something special even before Mr. Charles’ death last June at 73. Advance retail orders were brisker than expected, Mr. Barros says. “The record had built up a whole lot of momentum” — momentum that, apparently, couldn’t be killed by initially lukewarm reviews.

Concord’s Mr. Barros explains that Mr. Charles occupied a strange space in the pop pantheon that afforded him respect but little in the way of sales, unlike perennially hot-selling contemporaries such as Elvis Presley. “You may like Ray Charles, but you might not go to his bin when you go to the record store,” he says. “That’s how a Starbucks helps.”

Consider: Before last year, a Ray Charles album had not seen Billboard’s top 10 since 1964. More surprising still, “Genius,” which the soul legend recorded while ill, was the first Charles album of any era to be certified platinum (signifying sales of 1 million).

Can we expect Starbucks to become a big player in music retail?

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