The music industry may be struggling, but Putumayo World Music has barely noticed. "The down times have been our best years," said Dan Storper, 52, Putumayo's founder. He predicts that sales for the year will approach US$13 million, up almost 20 percent from last year.
That is pretty good in an industry besieged by file sharing and CD copying, and suffering from big declines in both sales and the number of music stores. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, shipments of music products declined more than 15 percent in the first half of 2003 from the period a year earlier, after drops of more than 10 percent in both 2001 and 2002.
PHOTO: NYT
Putumayo has been successful in part because it homed in on a niche market, in this case a growing taste for world music, defined by Storper as international music with tribal origins. The label's melodic and upbeat compilations range from Arabic Groove, contemporary music from North Africa and the Middle East, to Brasileiro, featuring samba and bossa nova, to Celtic Tides, with old and new songs by artists from Ireland, Scotland and Cape Breton in Canada.
Other labels distribute similar fare. But what sets Putumayo apart, its fans say, are its focus and its marketing, including distinctive folk art and comprehensive liner notes.
"Putumayo single-handedly revolutionized the whole genre," said Chris Fleming, who buys audio and video products for the stores at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. It sells the company's CDs, including some customized ones for special exhibits. "Before Putumayo came along, world music was dry, field recordings," said Fleming, who previously helped set up the world music department at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, New York. "They brought it out of the archives, made it more accessible."
Putumayo's CDs are carried by big retailers, but most are sold in more than 4,000 specialty stores in over 50 countries. Many outlets are unconventional -- including zoos, cafes, and gift and health food stores. But such sites have been "the daily bread and butter that has sustained us through thick and thin," Storper said on a recent morning at his office in the NoHo district of Manhattan.
One trademark of Storper's marketing style is "storebusting." Susan Bergier, owner of the Amaryllis Clothing Co. in Portland, Maine, which sells Putumayo CDs, said these personal visits were more like sneak attacks than product pitches. "He is relentless," she said. "He will come in and criticize a display, putting the CDs back in order. He will call the office to reorder what is missing. It is not a sales call; it's on a different level."
Like many entrepreneurs, Storper stumbled into his current business. He started off in handicrafts and clothing from around the world, opening his first Putumayo store to sell such products in 1975. (The company is named after a river valley in Colombia that he has visited.) Eventually, he expanded to six more sites, and he played music in all of them. After a while, Storper said, he became too busy to oversee the choice of music. But one day in 1991, when he visited one of his boutiques in Manhattan, he was distressed to hear the pounding beats of heavy metal, which he judged inappropriate for his merchandise.
He shopped around but couldn't find the sound he was looking for. A few days earlier, he had attended a concert in San Francisco by Kotoja, a Nigerian juju band based in the US, and was entranced by the ebullient dance rhythms -- Afropop with elements of American rhythm and blues. "I can't believe how good this music is," he recalled thinking. So he put together his own tapes of similar music and played them in his stores. Right away, customers asked where they could buy the tapes.
He decided that they should buy the music from him, so he produced two CDs and started selling them in his stores in 1993 as a sideline. Since then, he has put together more than 100 albums, including the compilations Music From the Coffee Lands and Cuba, each of which has sold more than 300,000 copies, as well as albums by individual musicians, like the Malian guitarist and singer Habib Koite.
Sales of CDs grew each year, though it is unclear if the label was profitable, because its accounting was combined with that of the clothing business. In 1997, Storper sold the clothing company to his chief operating officer and an outside investor.
Since then, there have been some rough times. In each of its first four years after the sale, Putumayo recorded six-figure losses, Storper said. Beginning in 2000, several big retailers went bankrupt, leaving their debts to the company unpaid. And, like the rest of the industry, the company experienced huge returns of unsold CDs.
Putumayo was also growing too quickly, Storper said, with too many releases and not enough time to promote them properly. So he cut back on releases and reined in expenses; in early 2002, he closed the West Coast office he had opened in 1999. As a result, the company had its first profitable year in 2002, earning close to half a million dollars on sales of US$10.8 million, he said.
Storper says his mission is as much about promoting world understanding as about making money, and he sees nothing odd about mixing the two. He recalls that at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1960s, his fellow students accused him of unhealthy capitalist instincts when he sold records and posters out of his room for less than the campus store charged, yet still made a profit. He didn't let their barbs bother him.
"I always felt business could be a force for positive change," he said.
Storper says many people have perceptions of developing countries that are skewed by news coverage. When it comes to many parts of the world, "the public is more likely to know about civil war," he said, while art and music tend to be overlooked. Yet it is music that many cultures turn to "to rise above their problems," he said.
Jacob Edgar, an ethnomusicologist who is Putumayo's vice president for product development, described Putumayo as primarily a "lifestyle, cultural company." Music is the vehicle, he said, "but the overriding mission is a cultural one."
Part of the proceeds from the sales of some CDs are given back to the cultures where the music originated, Storper said. For example, he said, the company has given more than US$20,000 from sales of Music From the Coffee Lands to Coffee Kids, which helps children and families in coffee-growing areas.
The label also produces a syndicated radio show, TV specials and children's CDs and plans to release DVDs and a children's book next year. In addition it is introducing a line of paper products, starting with a calendar this month and note cards and a travel journal early in 2004. Even so, the company wants to avoid moving too fast in what it views as a wide-open market.
"If you look at other countries, such as France, world music is frequently among the top 10 pop hits, even reaching No. 1," Edgar said. "We haven't gotten there yet. We have a long way to go."
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