As java brews, CDs burn at coffeehouse

Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee,” Rick Danko’s “Java Blues,” Frank Sinatra’s “The Coffee Song,” Faith No More’s “Caffeine”....

With any luck, those tracks will be among the 250,000 songs customers will be able to burn onto customized CDs when the Hear Music Coffeehouse opens Tuesday in Santa Monica.

It’s the first-born offspring of an alliance between Starbucks and Hewlett-Packard, and the latest venture attempting to lure music fans in with CD compilations they create for themselves. It’s the next step in Starbucks’ marriage of music and caffeine since purchasing the Hear Music company five years ago and subsequently selling multi-artist Hear Music compilation CDs in its stores.

“This is not a test,” Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz told Business Week recently. “We’re going for it.”

Company officials expect to make the CD-burning service available with kiosks nationwide in 2,500 new and existing Starbucks stores in the next few years. The kiosks will offer patrons the added ability to burn full albums.

That’s not an option at the Santa Monica outlet, a former Hear Music retail store that’s been remodeled with CD burning/listening stations at the coffee bar as well as among the CD bins.

The customizing concept has been tried, with marginal success, for at least two decades, dating to services in the ‘80s allowing consumers to make their own cassette mix tapes. The era of CDs and digitally downloadable music makes the process easier and faster, but the question is whether that makes it significantly more attractive to listeners.

Some Best Buy stores also have kiosks that let customers pay to select songs and download them immediately onto CDs. The advantage today over previous attempts is that most major labels are now making music available for such services, increasing the choices available to those who would use them.

The cost of a CD you assemble and burn while sipping your double decaf latte with a twist at the Hear Music Coffeehouse will start at $6.99 for five songs. Additional songs cost $1 each. Because it’s also a record store, a selection of conventional CDs will be offered for sale.

Starbucks officials hope the convenience factor will allow their venture to succeed where others have failed.

“This is for the person who says, ‘I go to Starbucks every morning, but I don’t always have time to go to the record store to buy the CD I want,’ ” says company spokeswoman Jenny Walsh. “ ‘Since I’m going to Starbucks anyway, while I’m drinking my coffee, I can peruse the albums, find what I want and just burn it right here.’ ”

-- Randy Lewis