Remember in the early days of CD burners when we were supposed to be able to go to any music store and burn our own mix CDs? With the exception of a few under used kiosks, it never happened. Now Starbucks is getting ready to launch their own music service directly inside its numerous coffee shops. Using HP tablet PCs, customers will be able to listen to and choose from over 250,000 songs, which can then be burned to disc, complete with custom label, while waiting for their latte to be fluffed.
No word on price per song (or per CD), but Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz says this isn’t a test — the first store with the service opens March 15, and will be pushed out to over 2,500 stores in the next two years. The real question is if anyone cares enough to justify the massive hardware deployment to all the shops.
Does this interest anyone at all, or have services like iTunes and Rhapsody leap-frogged the need for in-store CD burning?
