Muze Nurtures Body, Mind, Spirit
Service Enables New-Age-Themed Web Sites To Create Customized E-Commerce Centers
By TRUDI M. ROSENBLUM
March 29, 2003

With an eye toward capitalizing on a growing market for wellness-oriented products and services, Muze has launched a new database/e-commerce product that enables everything from health food stores and yoga studios to new-age-themed Web sites to preview and sell on the Web a comprehensive selection of related music, videos, and books-a category the company calls "body/mind/spirit."

Muze president/CEO Paul Zullo says, "It was clear to us a year-and-a-half ago that the body/mind/spirit area was a wave that would grow into a tsunami, and it has."

The service-Muze Store-Plus for Body, Mind, Spirit-features a database of 35,000 to 40,000 products, including 11,000 CDs. Participating Web sites pay Muze $100 per month. In return, the database is customized with the Web site's logo and style. For an extra fee, the site can also have fulfillment handled through Baker & Taylor, making the service a turnkey solution.

"The environment is branded to look and feel like the client's home page, so the customer feels an intimacy with the site," Zullo explains. "The customer stays on our client's site; they're not sent to a different place."

The database features what Muze calls a "category tree" that breaks each brand down into smaller, more specific subcategories. For example, in the music category, a search for "new age" creates a list of subcategories that includes instrumental, voice, flute, and piano, enabling the customer to find exactly what he or she is looking for. Likewise, in video, a search for "yoga" brings up such subcategories as hatha yoga, chakra yoga, kripalu yoga, and yogacise. As a result, the service gives a small, independent Web site the appearance of a much larger business with an inventory of tens of thousands of products.

Muze did a beta launch of the product Jan. 4 and rolled it out at the end of that month. Zullo says Muze Store-Plus currently has a half-dozen clients.

He adds that Muze Store-Plus represents one way that new-age music labels can branch out beyond traditional music stores. "A health food store or a yoga studio might carry a few CDs or videos but couldn't really stock a big selection or sell it efficiently," he says. "With this service, they can offer their customers thousands of products virtually."

Among those making use of the service is author/teacher/spiritual healer Shirley Knapp, who sells books, tapes, and services through her one-woman Web site. In January, she added Muze Store-Plus to it. "It gives me the appearance of having a huge store. I'm getting a lot more visitors to my site every day," Knapp says. "It's great not just to get more orders but to be able to share all this information with visitors. I can offer my clients thousands of body/mind/spirit products that they might never have found otherwise." [emphasis added]

The service is a good fit for this genre, Knapp says, because "most people in this industry are small-a little shop with two or three people" and thus would not be able to offer such a comprehensive selection without help. She adds that for these nontraditional outlets, music is a natural product to offer: "We use music so much: for healing, for relaxation, for meditating." [emphasis added]

Barbara Smalley, assistant executive director of Ladyslipper-a women's music label based in Durham, N.C.-sees an opportunity to increase sales through nontraditional outlets with the service. She says, "[Specialty] shop owners have seen sales through [music] marketing."

Robert Ansell, CEO of Raven Recordings in New York, says Muze Store-Plus is "a way for retailers to expand their catalog and inventory without really expanding their catalog or inventory."

He adds that "gift shops, new-age-type stores, health food stores, [and] yoga studios are all tremendous outlets for music. More and more of them are carrying it now."