About three years ago, Steve Stone had an idea: It should be infinitely more difficult to find a needle in a haystack than build a really great music collection. Unfortunately, the music industry doesn’t make it that easy, says the former corporate man. After a bit of research, Stone, the founder of Austin’s Blue Marble Music ( www.bluemarblemusic.com), discovered that adults over the age of 25 purchase 70% of all music sold, and yet the vast majority of music products are targeted for teenage consumption.
“We created this company,” says Stone, who recently relocated from Austin to Providence, R.I., “with the idea that we would make it easy for those people that want to explore music beyond the Top 40, but don’t have the time to sort through a half-million titles at the record store.”
Last fall, then, Stone and the five employees of Blue Marble Music launched a series of handsome little books accompanied by a CD cleverly pocketed inside the cover. For the first publication, Deep Sleep 101, Blue Marble chose Harvard Medical School sleep expert Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs, also the author of Say Good Night to Insomnia, to write the text. Along with facts about body-temperature rhythms and advice for maintaining habits that encourage deep sleep, the folks at Blue Marble included a greatest hits package of soothing tunes (“Having a Good Time” by Samite, Pink Martini’s “Lullaby,” Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” performed by the Choir of King’s College, among others). The second entry in the series, Legends of New Orleans, written by Cajun expert and former Chronicle Food writer Pableaux Johnson, divulges the lowdown on both the city’s institutions and its out-of-the-way dives. The music, meanwhile, is provides by the likes of Dr. John, Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, and Professor Longhair. Yummy.
Blue Marble’s third guidebook, Classical Explorer, has two CDs and short biographical notes on the featured composers. Each Blue Marble publication tends to have appealing, quirky personal notes from Stone in a short introduction that fronts the book. He says the company’s plan is to release 60-80 more books, a new one approximately every six weeks, until “we think we’ve developed a world-class collection of music.”
“We spent about two years developing this company and doing a lot of research all over the country,” says Stone, hiring Austin ad agency McGarrah-Jessee to determine whether consumers would actually purchase a CD stored inside a little book. “It included all kinds of nonconforming research from New York to Seattle, and a lot of places in-between. What we found out is worth a whole lot to the major record companies.”
In general , explains Stone, what people want is an easier way to build an amazing collection of music, with some information about the topic to go along with it “to give them a deeper appreciation for it.”
This article appears in February 1 • 2002.