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Starbucks Finally Rolling Out Music Service

Surprises

from the now-what? dept

Thu, Oct 14th 2004 10:14am — Mike Masnick
Just last month we were saying that Starbucks seemed to be perpetually delaying their efforts to roll out in-store music burning kiosks, and now they're finally planning to launch next week -- though just in the hip music spots of Seattle and Austin. It's still not entirely clear how they're going to train the baristas to fix a busted computer. Also, they've downgraded their original "hundreds of thousands of songs" to a mere 150,000 -- about 15% of what iTunes currently offers, which certainly suggests they're taking the Wal-Mart approach of just supply the hits, while ignoring the lucrative long tail. It's also still not clear why people will want to go to Starbucks to specifically buy music when they can get much more at home, or simply sitting in a Starbucks with their own laptop.
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  • identicon
    jeremiah, 14 Oct 2004 @ 10:50am

    my prediction

    From the PCWorld article:


    "Specifically, each Starbucks location will have several HP Tablet PC TC1100s with headphones and without keyboards: customers will use a stylus to interact with the machines' user interface via a touch screen monitor. The PCs will feature a core custom-made application which will let the user search for music, listen to tracks, and burn CDs. Meanwhile, the media bars will also have an HP xw4100 workstation for the actual creation and burning of the CDs, while the printing of CD art is done on an HP Business Inkjet 9670 Printer. HP's services unit developed the system's custom software on a Microsoft platform."


    Here's HP's page on the tablet PC.


    I wonder: have these tablet PC's undergone any kind of public coffeehouse beta? What happens when my Machiatto spills over the screen? Do they clean they stylus?


    Starbucks says there's one in Santa Monica on the Promenade. Has anyone been in there and tried this out?

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Mark, 14 Oct 2004 @ 12:46pm

    Hip? Not.

    Seattle hasn't been a hip music place since Nirvana crashed and burned. This feature rollout is only here because this is Starbucks' home planet.

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Secret Squirrel, 14 Oct 2004 @ 8:16pm

      Re: Hip? Not.

      Bullshit man, have you been to concerts in the Seattle area lately? The Fitness, Plan B, Idiot Pilot, and U.S.E. all rock the house in Seattle not to mention Oldominion and Grayskul in the hip-hop realm are awesome. Maybe they aren't national sensations yet, but they still kick it harder than a hell of a lot of other bands in other states. Get the hell out of Washington you fucking wanker!

      [ link to this | view in chronology ]


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