Melinda Newman Quotations

What you have to remember is that Starbucks is in the coffee business.

Do they have an impact? Absolutely. People feel they have a 'Good Housekeeping' seal of approval, that any CD they see in a Starbucks already has the Starbucks seal of approval, and therefore they're going to like it.

Some famous artists never see that. For an eclectic group that wasn't going to have an easy time finding a radio format, that's not a bad number.

Some said it was horrible to get exclusives of any kind, that traditional retailers had broken these acts for years and this was the kind of thanks they got. But others said that when they were developing an act they probably would have done something like this.

They've become a power in the industry. They're a force to be reckoned with. People are looking at Starbucks and saying, 'This is a project where we'd be best served by making a deal with Starbucks even if it pisses off traditional retailers.