Music downloads to go: firms vie for foodservice dollars

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct 25, 2004

For just about every taste in music, it seems, there's a download service to accommodate it. And with foodservice companies scrambling to launch the next high-tech music-related promotion, such providers are gearing up for a new age in music marketing.

Sony Connect Inc., based in Santa Monica, Calif., is a subsidiary of Sony Corp. of America that offers more than 600,000 downloadable music tracks from major labels and independent artists.

Connect also offers a unique employee-retention program, something that Jay Samit, general manager of Sony Connect Inc., learned was an essential part of the business back when he was manning the meat slicer at his father's chain of dells in San Diego. He notes that one of the biggest issues for anyone in the restaurant business is high turnover.

"Connect has developed a special program for restaurant employees' retention: grow and learn a new skill, get a song or an album. Make it to your year or six-month anniversary and you get a Walkman," he explains. "These are very low cost to implement and can work with almost any scale restaurant chain."

It appeals to any ethnic group and to the 16- to 25-year-olds Connect wants to attract, Samit explains. And if a customer doesn't have a broadband connection at home, they can connect at the store and download their music there.

"Now you can make it a cool place to work" Samit says. "When you look at many chains that have a 200-percent or higher turnover of youths and at the cost of training, we can be a huge cost savings. As they're on the job, they're earning music."

Sony Connect's music library includes some 750,000 tracks--"pretty much everything that anybody will like"--which the company plans to keep expanding, into international markets as well.

"We can also do promotions with special libraries," he says. "For a Mexican chain we can do [Latino] music. During the holidays we can provide holiday music. Think of all the great rock-and-roll Christmas songs. There's a myriad of things that can be done."

San Francisco-based ECast Inc., which owns and operates Location-Based Broadband Network[TM], partners with leading American jukebox manufacturers to market Internet-driven jukeboxes in all 50 states.

ECast is the operator for providing the back-end infrastructure that supplies the jukeboxes with songs, but the jukeboxes themselves are manufactured by such brand name companies Rowe International, Rock-Ola and NSM Inc., according to ECast spokesman Eric Schwartzman.

"A number of franchisees for KFC, Pizza Hut and Denny's have them in their establishments" Schwartzman says.

The company began installing ECast-driven Rowe International jukeboxes for the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Fatburger quick-service chain in late May, and units are up and working at Fatburger's California locations in Irvine, Santa Monica and Corona, as well as in Clearwater, Fla. The chain is in the process of installing the jukes chainwide at all its existing and future locations.

Fatburger is the first QSR chain to make the broadband-enabled ECast jukebox a standard fixture at its units, and it's about halfway there, Schwartzman says.

The ECast jukebox has a catalog of more than 150,000 songs and functions like a regular jukebox, only Internet-driven. "You punch in the name of an artist, album or song on a touchscreen monitor" Schwartzman explains. "Either that, or select the keyboard function and type it in. Or you can browse through album art by genre, if you like"

The latest ECast product is E-Rock, manufactured by Rock-Ola, he says. Each uses the Internet to access the ECast catalog. "You would need to get onto the Internet to hook up your jukebox" Schwartzman explains. "Then your jukebox can access ECast's catalog of more than 150,000 songs."

Musicmatch Inc. of San Diego has just launched its latest product, Musicmatch On Demand 9.0, which gives users instant access to more than 650,000 tracks for as little as $8 dollars a month, says company spokeswoman Linda Barger.

A second feature of Musicmatch On Demand allows the subscriber to send music to a friend's computer.

"You can create a playlist and send it to friends, even if your friends don't have a subscription to Musicmatch. They can listen to your playlist up to three times" Barger says. "It's a great way to try out an album before you decide if you want to buy it. It's also a really good tool for learning what music they like."

Papa John's International Inc. of Louisville, Ky. is the only restaurant chain that Musicmatch is doing a promotion with right now, she says. Musicmatch, Papa John's and Coca-Cola[R] teamed up earlier this year for Papa John's "Pizza and Entertainment" campaign extension, "4 To Go!," in which folks buying four 20-ounce Coca-Cola beverages of their choice for $3.99 received their drinks in a new Music Edition carrier that included an official cut-and-reveal sticker with four free music track downloads from Musicmatch, valued at 99 cents per download

National TV, radio, print and point-of-purchase ads supported the three-month promo, which ran through Sept. 5.