CD donations have problems
SEATTLE – Can one library have too many Whitney Houston CDs?
That’s among the quandaries facing school and library officials here as they wade through thousands of CDs that began pouring in this month as part of a 43-state price-fixing settlement with the recording industry.
Some of the discs are raunchy rap unsuitable for school libraries, and some librarians say the selection looks suspiciously like the music companies are dumping stale inventory.
The Puget Sound Educational Service District, serving 35 school districts, got 1,300 copies of Houston’s soaring rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” a disc that includes only one other song, “America the Beautiful.”
“Really, you can never have too many Whitney Houston CDs,” joked district spokeswoman Karen Farley.
Farley said weeding out CDs with parental-notification stickers is easy, but the fine-tuning will take more work.
She pulled six or seven CDs with warning labels but shipped the rest, though she had qualms about Meredith Brooks’ “Blurring the Edges,” which includes the Grammy-nominated song “Bitch.”
“I remember several people saying, ‘I’m surprised there’s not a sticker on that,’ ” she said. “I’m sure some truly egregious things got to the districts just because I didn’t know” the artist or the material.
Washington was the first state to receive the CDs – more than 115,000 of them for libraries, colleges and schools.
The settlement stems from a lawsuit against several music distributors and recording companies, alleging price fixing. The companies were accused of penalizing retailers who offered cheaper CDs by withholding advertising reimbursement if the retailers cut prices.
The industry agreed to pay out $67 million to consumers – mailed out as $13.86 checks a few months ago. The CD giveaway to schools, colleges and libraries will cost the industry an estimated $76 million.
The CDs were selected by experts and educators for their lasting significance, and attorneys general for the states involved signed off on the list, said Gary Larson, a spokesman for Washington Attorney General Christine Gregoire.
“We did not just give carte blanche to the recording industry to provide any CDs they had left over in their warehouse,” Larson said. To qualify, CDs had to have been on industry charts for 26 weeks, or to have peaked in the top half of the charts.
Librarian Lara Weigand at the Tacoma Public Library is dubious that even half of the 1,325 CDs sent to her 10-library system meet the criteria.
And she said she doesn’t need 57 copies of “Three Mo Tenors,” based on a 2001 PBS special about African-American tenors.
“It was well-received, but if you were making core lists of everything a library should have, the CDs shipped would generally not be on them,” Weigand said.
About 70 percent of the CDs she received were notched, suggesting they may have been leftovers, she said.
Gregoire’s office is advising recipients to swap their duplicates with other recipients – an e-mail list is being set up to help out – and sell the discs they don’t want.
The office also is checking on the complaints to see if the settlement was violated, and has notified the claims administrator in hopes of averting similar problems in other states, Larson said.
“We were trying to do some good for schools and libraries across the state,” he said. “We may not have been quite as successful as we’d hoped but we have ample evidence that many … are happy with what they’ve received.”