Starbucks to offer digital music cds

NEW YORK (Mp3 magazine) - March 16th will see the unveiling of the coffee stop Starbucks' latest venture. Starbucks announced plans to introduce music sales in its U.S. stores, allowing customers to sit and listen to music while they drink their coffee, and then giving them the option to select a number of tracks and have them burned on CD for purchase. A single store in Santa Monica, California, will see the service initially, followed by its introduction in the other 2,500 U.S. stores over a two-year period.

Starbucks has stated that this move into offering music sales is due to changes in the way the music industry operates. Deals have been signed with major music chains allowing the coffee shops to offer a large range of music to suit everyone's tastes. Pricing for tracks will be comparable to those seen on music services such as Apple's iTunes.

Starbucks and Hewlett-Packard have formed an alliance to install the machinery and software for Starbucks customers to program the creation of custom CDs while they're sipping their coffee. A company executive told Business Week that within two years customers in more than 2,000 Starbucks locations will be able to choose from 250,000 songs. The timeline may not necessarily apply in Hawaii, where a local franchise company, not Starbucks itself, owns and operates the scores of Starbucks locations in the islands.
What's fresh about the idea is that retail outlets have a temporarily captive audience for music that customers may decide they want to have.