A FRAPPUCCINO & A RAY CHARLES CD

Things would get even worse, but 2004 was such a bleak year for the music industry that Don Henley took to the op-ed section of the Washington Post to bemoan the state of the biz, condemning consolidation among the majors and largely blaming the labels for the piracy that was decimating the business. “Sales have decreased between 20 and 30% over the past three years,” Henley wrote. “Record labels are suing children for using unauthorized peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems… The music business is in crisis.”

One of the few bright spots that year was a new record label driven by the success of a sickly sweet coffee drink. In 1999 Starbucks, flush with cash from sales of its Frappuccino, had purchased a mini-chain of tastemaking record stores, Hear Music. Starbucks would eventually subsume Hear Music and sell a curated selection of CDs (let’s call it “latte rock”) at its outlets, at a time when traditional record stores were on a steep decline. In 2004, Howard Schultz, then chief global strategist for Starbucks, told Fast Company about the coffee merchant’s first gambit as a record label, a duets album with Ray Charles in conjunction with Concord Music. “Starbucks is broadening its view of what’s possible,” he said. The album, he accurately predicted, “is going to be everywhere.”

One of those places would be the 47th Grammy Awards, held on Feb. 13, 2005, where Genius Loves Company, the aforementioned Charles album, was nominated for nine trophies, including Record and Album of the Year. Charles, among the titans of American music, had died from liver failure in June 2003 at age 73; Genius, featuring collaborations with Elton John, Johnny Mathis, Norah Jones, Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor, among others, arrived two months later; and Ray, the hit biopic starring Jamie Foxx, came two months after that.

If ever an album and a subsequent set of circumstances screamed “Grammy bait,” this was it.

On Grammy night, Foxx and Alicia Keys paid musical tribute to Charles, and the Charles/Jones duet, “Here We Go Again,” won for Record of the Year. So, despite some fierce competition for Album of the Year from contemporary stars USHER (Confessions), Kanye West (The College Dropout), Green Day (American Idiot) and Keys (The Diary of Alicia Keys), few were surprised when Gary Sinise and Raitt (hint hint) announced that Genius Loves Company had won the Grammys’ most prestigious honor.

Genius was the final studio recording from Charles and the high-water mark for Hear Music: The album would climb to #1 following the Grammys, becoming Charles’ first chart-topper since Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in 1962. Hear Music morphed into Hear Records, releasing albums by artists including Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, but Starbucks would bow out of the record business in 2008 and stopped selling CDs in its stores altogether in 2015. “How will we know what Adult Contemporary stations are playing without having to listen to the radio?” quipped Vulture. “How will we choose the perfect fifth day of Hanukkah gift for our parents?”