Dan Storper, a retailer who founded the Putumayo World Music record label, which gathered sounds from every corner of the globe, helping to propel the world music boom of the 1990s and beyond with compilation CDs that sold in the millions, died on May 22 at his home in New Orleans. He was 74.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his son, William, said.
Mr. Storper’s label began as an offshoot of Putumayo, a now-closed retail chain that he started in New York in 1975, selling handicrafts and clothing from around the world. He founded the label with a friend, Michael Kraus, in 1993, and it became a showcase for genres that had received little mainstream recognition, especially in the United States, such as zouk, from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean; soukous, from Congo; and son cubano, from Cuba.
With distinctive folk-art album covers by the British artist Nicola Heindl, the label developed a strong brand identity, luring neophyte buyers who broadly understood what they were getting with a Putumayo release, even if they knew nothing about the music itself.
“The whole concept was to bring the music to a community of people that weren’t specifically world music freaks, but were interested in music and culture and travel,” Jacob Edgar, Putumayo’s longtime ethnomusicologist, said in an interview. “It was really almost more of a lifestyle brand at its height, and that was really revolutionary at the time.”
Others came to agree. “Before Putumayo came along, world music was dry field recordings,” Chris Fleming, of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2003. “Putumayo single-handedly revolutionized the whole genre.”
Putumayo largely focused not on individual artists or acts, as traditional labels do, but on collections of multiple artists, often organized around a single region, country or theme. “Music from the Chocolate Lands” (2004), for example, featured the beats of cacao-producing countries like Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, Ivory Coast and Peru; “Mali to Memphis” (1999) traced the African origins of the blues.
The label has been unconventional in how it has sold its wares as well — not just through record store chains, but also through small displays or listening stations in bookstores, museum shops, airport shops and even the occasional hardware store, in addition to the Putumayo chain’s own stores and Whole Foods. By the early 2000s, Putumayo CDs were available in more than 4,000 such outlets in approximately 50 countries.
Despite the relative obscurity of the material to Western listeners, the label has sold an estimated 35 million copies of its 400 or so releases, said Mr. Edgar, who now runs Putumayo Digital Media, which focuses on compilations and playlists for streaming and downloading.
At least 100 of its releases each sold about 100,000 copies, and several surpassed one million, including “Cuba,” a 1999 release that surfed the wave of enthusiasm for Cuban music that flowed from Wim Wender’s hit documentary that year, “The Buena Vista Social Club.”
Over the years, Putumayo’s catalog also included jazz and blues releases and collections for children. Prominent mainstream artists like Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne performed songs for the label, as did Bonnie Raitt, whose collaboration with the Malian musician Habib Koité on “Back Around” appeared on “Putumayo Presents Blues Around the World” (2006).
Dan Mitchell Storper was born on May 20, 1951, in Manhattan, the oldest of three children of David Storper, a lawyer, and Natalie (Reichlin) Storper, a social worker.
He grew up in Great Neck, N.Y., on the North Shore of Long Island, where he graduated from William A. Shine Great Neck South High School in 1969. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies from Washington University in St. Louis in 1973, he “set out to visit the countries I’d studied,” he said in an interview last May with CanvasRebel, an online magazine.
“On my first day in Colombia,” he continued, “I saw a beautiful hand-woven wall-hanging that I thought people back home would love. I decided to travel through South America collecting handicrafts to sell in the U.S. using money I’d saved up doing odd jobs and teaching tennis.”
Mr. Storper named his business after the Putumayo River and valley in southern Colombia, which he had visited during carnival time. By the 1990s, the company had six retail outlets, in New York City, Washington, Boston and Princeton, N.J.
He got the idea to add a music element to Putumayo when he wandered into one of his New York stores one day in 1991 and was dismayed to hear his staff playing heavy metal music over the loudspeakers. Inspired by an idyllic concert by a Nigerian juju band he had recently seen in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, he started making mixtapes of world music to serve as a sonic salve for his retail operation.
The response from shoppers was so positive, Mr. Edgar said, that Mr. Storper and Mr. Kraus decided to launch a label, initially in partnership with Rhino Records.
Mr. Storper and Mr. Edgar soon began traveling the world to unearth new sounds. Mr. Edgar said that on a trip to the Sahara in the mid-1990s, he learned that members of the nomadic Tuareg ethnic group had gotten “really into electric guitars in the 1970s and were huge fans of Led Zeppelin and Dire Straits.” Examples of their Indigenous music fused with Western rock appeared on multiple Putumayo compilations.
By 1997, the Putumayo brand — which also offered a clothing line — had achieved enough of a cultural footprint to be cited prominently in an episode of “Seinfeld,” in which Elaine gets into a running dispute with a Putumayo sales clerk over huarache sandals. Mr. Storper loved the shout-out, despite Elaine’s kvetching about his store. “It was one of those all-press-is-good-press situations,” Mr. Edgar said.
Mr. Storper sold his stake in the retail operation in 1997. The last store closed in 2001.
The rise of music streaming eventually shook the foundation of the Putumayo World Music business model, just as it had for major labels. Putumayo, which later relocated to New Orleans, started its streaming and download-only offshoot in 2022 as it transitioned out of CDs.
In addition to his son, William, Mr. Storper is survived by his sisters Sarah Field and Barbara Storper. His marriage to Amy Sevante ended in divorce, which was finalized this year.
Over the years, Mr. Storper said that his goal was never purely commercial. As a committed globalist, as he described himself, he hoped to change perceptions of developing countries. The American public, he told The Times in 2003, was “more likely to know about civil war” in those countries than about the flourishing musical traditions that could help those countries “rise above their problems.”
“I always felt business could be a force for positive change,” he said.
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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