The label’s CDs are sold in record stores, as well as through a network of thousands of clothing boutiques, museum gift shops and Whole Foods markets. Until now, however, Putumayo has been behind the commercial curve in one important aspect: as one of the last holdouts on digital music, it has made none of its albums available as downloads. That will finally change on Tuesday, when the label releases its first two digital albums, “African Beat” and “Latin Beat.”
The digital revolution has been a struggle for plenty of record companies, but for Mr. Storper, Putumayo’s co-founder and chief executive, deciding to take that plunge was as much a personal matter as a professional one.
“I’ve built a business focused on creating compelling physical packages that combine music, culture and travel, that make great gifts and that sound very good,” he said. “I’m 60 years old. I still don’t own an iPod or iPad. I like reading physical books, magazines and newspapers, and buying CDs that have interesting liner notes. I’m certainly not an early adopter.”
The physicality of Putumayo’s products has been central to its success. Each album has a cover designed in the same folk-art-inspired style, along with detailed yet non-egghead liner notes sometimes spiced with local recipes. The label supplies retail stores with branded display cases for its CDs, which are drawn from material released by record companies around the world. And while world-music purists have never quite accepted Putumayo, its albums have proved reliable impulse buys for millions of curious shoppers.
“The world of music is an ocean,” said Mr. Storper, who has a shaggy tuft of white hair and no shortage of stories about traversing the globe for music and crafts. “Part of what we do is curate, and try to find songs that are universal.”
Putumayo had its beginnings in 1975, when Mr. Storper, a freshly minted Latin American studies graduate, opened a handicrafts shop in Manhattan that grew into a clothing line supplying hundreds of boutiques. (The store became so popular that it was even featured in a “Seinfeld” episode.) In 1993 he started the label, teaming up with Rhino Records for its first releases. Rhino distributed the albums to record stores, and Mr. Storper worked his specialty shop connections, eventually building that side of his business into an alternative distribution network that is the envy of the music industry, said Richard Foos, a founder of Rhino who is now with the reissue label Shout! Factory.
“Our feeling at Rhino was that we could sell 10 times the amount of product if we could really get in front of the consumer at record stores,” Mr. Foos said. “Dan did the exact opposite in that he found everywhere to sell his product.”
By the mid-2000s, Mr. Storper’s employees were urging him to go digital, but he resisted. He had a good thing going at brick-and-mortar retail and had never been at the forefront of technology anyway. (“I was one of the last people to get out of cassettes,” he said.) In recent years, though, as thousands of record stores have shut down, and retailers of all kinds have been hit by the recession, a transition to digital sales has seemed inevitable.
There was a hurdle: licensing. Most record companies, afraid of cannibalizing their own sales, have been willing to license songs for Putumayo’s digital compilations only if they were sold as part of a complete album, not as individual tracks; meanwhile, Mr. Storper said, iTunes usually requires that at least 85 percent of the tracks on an album be available for individual download. Lately some labels have become more lenient about licensing, Mr. Storper added, but it still took months to clear the tracks for “African Beat” and “Latin Beat.”
Putumayo still faces challenges of its own in going digital. How will a label used to browser-friendly physical packages at retail shops adapt to a market of ones and zeroes, where there are fewer opportunities for the last-minute impulse buy at the register? Scott Ambrose Reilly, a former Amazon executive now with the X5 Music Group, which has sold some 150 million tracks through digital compilations, said that many of the traditional marketing rules for compilations do not apply online. A cover, for example, must immediately convey the concept behind an album, and in a block of pixels no bigger than a postage stamp.
“You don’t have the luxury of people picking it up and looking at it for even 15 seconds,” Mr. Reilly said. “You have 2 or 3.”
If “African Beat” and “Latin Beat” are any indication, Putumayo has already learned that lesson. Unlike the covers on older albums, which usually feature multiple human figures and an appropriate location, these simply show stylized close-ups of instruments. The digital versions of these and future albums will contain only the songs; for the full liner notes and other goodies, a customer will have to buy the CD versions.
The list of artists and labels still holding out on digital is getting shorter all the time. Putumayo did not make it online before the Beatles, whose music went on sale at iTunes late last year. But it did beat Aerosmith, whose classic 1970s and ’80s albums will be available on iTunes for the first time next week.
“I think it will be written on my tombstone,” Mr. Storper said. “Better late than never.”
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