Music company in tune with older listeners

Steve Stone, president of Blue Marble<br>Music on Providence's East Side
Steve Stone, president of Blue Marble
Music on Providence's East Side

Major music labels put forward the theory that rampant piracy, via illegal
downloading sites such as Kazaa, are the reason for flagging CD sales.


Steve Stone doesn’t buy it.


Stone is president of Blue Marble Music, a tiny music company on Providence’s
East Side. He says the reason for declining U.S. CD sales (down for three straight
years according to the Recording Industry Association of America) is because
the music industry has turned its back on its biggest customer: the 25-and-older
demographic.


“The adult music buyer feels like he or she has been totally ignored by the
music industry as a whole,” says Stone, a 39-year-old former corporate turnaround
specialist.


Stone came to this realization four years ago while living in Austin, Texas,
a city famous for its thriving music scene. The endless stream of artists playing
gigs in Austin inspired him to overhaul and broaden his own music collection.


He didn’t know where to begin.


“I quickly realized it would be a full-time job to build an authentic, phenomenal
music collection,” said Stone, a native of Dallas, who had lived in Rhode Island
with his wife in the early 1990s and decided to move from Austin to Providence
in 2001. Stone sniffed a business opportunity, and decided to find out just
what older music buyers are looking for.


That process involved two years and $1 million of tedious market research.
Blue Marble hired several research firms to conduct interviews, surveys and
focus groups with adults in cities throughout the country.


The findings were consistent: Adult music buyers don’t have the time they
would like to devote to buying music. But like Stone, they also covet a broad-based,
intelligent music collection that includes musical genres like classical or
jazz, even if they don’t currently listen to them.


Using those common threads, Blue Marble developed and tested 10 product concepts,
packaging CD compilations with an introductory book for each genre or theme.


For example, among its first products is “Classical Explorer,” an introduction
to classical music that includes a 50-page hardback book, written by two longtime
professors at The Juilliard School in New York and New England Conservatory
of Music in Boston.


The experts also selected 26 songs for the two-CD compilation, aiming to give
listeners a taste of history’s most important composers. That product tested
higher than any other, despite sluggish classical music sales industry-wide,
Stone said.


“Older music buyers feel like, if they don’t know about classical music, they
should,” Stone says. “They don’t have time to read a 700-page book, but if they
can spend a couple hours reading a short book and listening to a couple of classical
CDs, it’s beautiful.”


Blue Marble plans to find 50 variations on that theme, from jazz and African
music to CD-books meant to enhance sensual moods or help people sleep better.


In fact, “Deep Sleep 101” was the company’s first product. The short guidebook,
which has a midnight-blue hardcover, was written by a prominent Harvard University
sleep researcher. The 13-song CD includes “Common Threads” by vocal jazz artist
Bobby McFerrin and “Lullaby” by the exotic-sounding group Pink Martini.


Blue Marble struck a deal last year to include the sleep CD-book in all 368
rooms of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City. Since then it has inked similar
agreements with 11 Four Seasons hotels from London to Singapore, as well as
a few posh resorts.


Upcoming offerings also tap another common interest among adult music fans:
travel. Blue Marble’s “Great Destinations” CD-books will probe the musical history
of places like New Orleans, Chicago and Spain, while offering advice on local
attractions and places to eat and stay.


The recently released “Legends of New Orleans” features songs ranging from
an obscure Louis Armstrong cut to tracks from contemporary New Orleans artists
such as Buckwheat Zydeco and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.


All of the CD-books are $19.95 and are available only at the Blue Marble Web
site, or at the hotels and resorts. Stone says the company probably will advertise
on television, although he is wary of it being lumped in with cheap record clubs
or “infomercials for groovy hits of the 60s.”


He is convinced that packaging a variety of musical genres for adults in a
way that allows them to better connect to and understand them is the key to
reaching this vast, untapped market. And he says it’s a strategy that is lost
on the large music companies.


“If your company is struggling, you have to go to your biggest customer and
figure out a way to market to them,” he said. That customer is the adult music
buyer, Stone says, – not teenagers, who surveys show account for just 17 percent
of sales but garner the majority of attention from marketers.


The secret might be out on Stone’s business plan, though. A survey last year
from New York-based NPD Group, a market research firm, shows that 36-and-older
listeners represent 45 percent of CD sales.


“Near-term population growth trends should stand as a warning to the industry
to reach out to older buyers,” NPD Group Vice President Russ Crupnick said in
a statement.


If early successes are any indication, Blue Marble might have found a good
formula to do just that. Although its Web site prominently displays a money-back
guarantee, not one of the thousands of CD-books it has sold has been returned,
Stone said.


 


Mike Colias is a contributing writer to PBN.

 



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