Starbucks Music: Coffee Chain to Stop Selling CDs After March 2015, What's Company's Next Move for Tunes?

Most people go to Starbucks with the intention to buy a coffee but many also find themselves with a new CD on the wait out the door. No longer: The company announced that it would be cutting sales of CDs in its 21,000 stores at the end of March 2015.

"We will stop selling physical CDs in our stores at the end of March," a spokesperson for the company told Billboard. "Starbucks continually seeks to redefine the experience in our retail stores to meet the evolving needs of our customers. Music will remain a key component of our coffeehouse and retail experience, however we will continue to evolve the format of our music offerings to ensure we're offering relevant options for our customers. As a leader in music curation, we will continue to strive to select unique and compelling artists from a broad range of genres we think will resonate with our customers."

In short: Starbucks is having just as much trouble as any other retailer in selling physical-format albums. The overall sales of CDs dropped by 15 percent during 2014. Still, Starbucks, as an entity that makes a majority of its profits from selling food and drink, seemed to be doing fairly well in terms of its music sales as well. Just a few weeks ago, a Leonard Cohen greatest hits collection sold exclusively at Starbucks made it onto our "Back of The Billboards" feature, indicating it had at least cracked in the Billboard 200 in terms of album sales. Not bad for collection featuring no new music.

One potential problem: The cafe has switched gears from promoting more offbeat genres and artists and has gone more mainstream in its offerings. Although Taylor Swift's 1989 and the Frozen soundtrack were among the bestselling albums of 2014, those aren't the titles that folks decide to randomly pick up at Starbucks. Your correspondent, for example, was recently pleased to note that the selection of jazz albums available at his local Starbucks was larger than that of Best Buy (which only stocked Kenny G's new album).

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