Settlement provides CDs to libraries

BOISE – From Ricky Martin to Johnny Cash, from Pavarotti to Pearl Jam, North Idaho librarygoers are about to see more music CDs on the shelves of their local libraries.

Thanks to a 40-state legal settlement with major music CD distributors and retailers, libraries across the state are getting 25,000 music CDs from an array of musical genres. Idaho’s shipments are going out about a month later than Washington’s, in part because the Idaho attorney general’s office haggled over the distributions to avoid dumping 50 or 100 copies of the same CD on, say, the Coeur d’Alene Public Library.

Instead, the 759 CDs bound for the Coeur d’Alene library include 15 copies of Ricky Martin’s “Sound Loaded,” 14 of “Corridos de Primera” by Tucanes de Tijuana and 11 of Mandy Moore’s self-titled CD, along with lots of smaller quantities of various country, pop, rock, jazz and classical fare.

“It’s not quite as nice as turning in your Christmas list to Santa and getting whatever you want, but librarians being librarians, I think any problems will get sorted out,” said Julie Meier, director of the Coeur d’Alene library.

Librarians routinely trade and share materials to provide variety for their patrons, she said. “It’s what we’ve done ever since libraries were invented – we share.”

The Coeur d’Alene library has no budget to buy music CDs, so its entire 935-disc collection has come about through donations. “We do have some, and they are used a lot,” Meier said. The discs are particularly popular among recipients of the library’s delivery service for the home-bound, she said.

The soon-to-arrive shipment of free CDs will boost Coeur d’Alene’s collection by 80 percent. “It’ll be very nice,” Meier said.

Idaho libraries are getting the CDs based on their numbers of library-card holders, with a minimum of 25 discs per library. The donations are the third phase of the multistate settlement in an anti-trust lawsuit over inflated CD prices.

In addition to donating CDs, the music companies promised to stop forcing retailers to raise CD prices and sent out millions to individual CD buyers who registered for $13.86 refunds. In Idaho, 15,500 buyers got those checks, totaling $214,830.

At the Hayden branch library of the Kootenai-Shoshone Libraries, co-director Lee Starr was enthusiastic after her first glance at a list of 1,309 new CDs her libraries will soon receive.

“Everything from the Monkees to Beethoven, we have it all,” Starr said. “Granted, there are duplicates, but I’ll tell you, some of the duplicates we will love having.”

Some are Christmas music CDs, she noted, such as the 15 copies of “Christmas with Yolanda Adams” and 10 copies of M. Crawford’s “A Christmas Album.” That holiday music circulates only about six weeks a year, Starr said, and with seven branch libraries, she’s looking forward to having more to spread around.

Other duplicates headed to Hayden include nine copies of “Essence” by Lucinda Williams, 15 of “December” by George Winston and 10 of Whitney Houston’s rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

But that’s nothing compared to what some in Washington received. That state was the first to get shipments of the CDs, and one group of school districts there received 1,300 copies of Houston’s patriotic disc.

Bob Cooper, spokesman for the Idaho attorney general’s office, said when publicity erupted about the odd choices among the CDs distributed in Washington, the consumer protection chief for Idaho, Brett DeLange, sent him a copy of an article on the brouhaha with a note. “It said, ‘See why we’re taking so long?’ ” Cooper recalled with a laugh.

Some of the same selections that drew complaints in Washington are coming to Idaho, too, but in much smaller quantities. The Tacoma library received 57 copies of the “Three Mo’ Tenors” CD from a 2001 PBS special about African-American tenors. The Kellogg Public Library is only getting two copies of that disc, but it’s getting three copies of Clay Davidson’s “Unconditional,” Handel’s “Messiah,” Puccini’s “Madam Butterfly” and a “60s Rock: Feelin’ Groovy” compilation CD. Those are the biggest duplicates among the 71 CDs headed to Kellogg.

“Brett really spent a lot of time going over these lists,” Cooper said.

Lorrie Byerly, a paralegal who worked with DeLange on the project, said, “It turned out better than I thought it would at one point, because I was reading for a while that it was all going to be ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and things that were unpopular. I see a lot of well-known artists here – George Strait, Tom Petty, Yanni.”

Deputy Attorney General David High said Idaho agreed to take any music that can be played on the air, and decided to distribute the discs to the state’s libraries to reach the most people.

In addition to trading discs, libraries are free to sell excess CDs they receive and buy others with the proceeds.

Starr said the Kootenai-Shoshone libraries likely will sell some CDs that don’t fit their collection, which numbers more than 3,000 CDs now. Half the collection is classical, while the other half is a mix that ranges from rock to world music to jazz to gospel.

“It all goes out very well, so we’re really looking forward to refreshing the collection with some new titles,” she said. “There’s a good mix here. There’s Christmas and country and classical and old standards.”

The defendants in the 2000 antitrust lawsuit, who denied the allegations but agreed to the court-approved settlement, were Bertelsmann Music Group Inc., EMI Music Distribution, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Corp., Sony Music Entertainment Inc., Universal Music Group, Transworld Entertainment Corp., Tower Records and Musicland Stores Corp.