You may have noticed that Starbucks shops prominently feature the DVD for the movie "Akeelah and the Bee" — what I just found out is that Starbucks co-financed the film (by all accounts, it's pretty good).
The interesting thing here is the retail opportunity presented by a Starbucks partnership for DVD distribution. In bookselling, research has it that more than half of the people who might buy a book if they spotted it will never set foot in a bookstore or place an online order. In the golden age of pharmacy and grocery-store spinner-racks, more than half the books sold were sold outside of stores. Big-box stores and online stores can put together a much deeper, long-tail-compliant catalog than neighborhood stores or pharmacies ever could, but they can only sell those books to the kind of people who are willing to patronize bookstores.
The thing about selling a movie or a CD or a book in a Starbucks or other popular retail establishment is that it's entirely positive for the sales of the media: the bookstore people will buy it in a bookstore, or maybe pick it up at Starbucks. The non-bookstore people who have an interest in that kind of movie/book/CD will pick up the title without cannibalizing sales that might have been been generated elsewhere. It's a wholly positive development.
Starbucks has already turned itself into a quiet powerhouse for CD sales for discs that it also owns a stake in — I'm fascinated to see if they manage to do this with movies, too.
(via Wonderland)
