News
Starbucks plans iTunes promos, 50 million song giveaway
By Jeremy Horwitz
Editor-in-Chief, iLounge
Published: Sunday, September 23, 2007
News Category: iTunes
In an effort to further its partnership with Apple to provide free wireless iPhone and iPod touch access to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, which begins on October 2 with access in 600 New York and Seattle-area locations, Starbucks today announced a number of promotions aimed at expanding the purchase of company-picked music from iTunes.
Most notably, Starbucks will give away 1.5 million iTunes downloads per day from October 2 to November 7, totalling 50 million downloads by the end of the promotion. Each day, over 10,000 Starbucks locations will hand out “Song of the Day” cards allowing customers to download one free track from an artist such as Bob Dylan, Joss Stone, Dave Matthews, Bebel Gilberto, John Mayer, KT Tunstall, John Legend, Annie Lennox, Joni Mitchell, Keith Urban or Paul McCartney.
U.S.-based locations of Starbucks will also begin to sell iTunes Digital Release Cards, which will include not only full albums from selected artists, but also bonus materials such as videos, music videos, bonus tracks and/or digital booklets, depending on the release. The Card must be activated at the Starbucks, and its contents downloaded on a Mac or PC. Starbucks will also offer the “Starbucks Card Plus Two,” a reloadable restaurant card that also entitles the purchaser to download two tracks of his or her choice from the U.S. iTunes Store.
Interestingly, Starbucks also confirmed that its iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store partnership enables users to access the Store not only from the iPhone and iPod touch, but also through laptops running iTunes software. As such, wireless access to iTunes with any of these devices won’t require either a hotspot login or payment of connection fees.
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1
I would like to see a better choice of songs. Also why is it taking so long to roll out the iTunes Mobile Music Store to all these Starbucks in Major Cities. We only have 3 Starbucks in out little city, how long is is going to take to show up here. I know it will take a little work on the local level to have auto-logons for the iPhone and iPod Touch but if Starbucks were to give out a temp password then all locations should be able to access the store.
Posted by Randy Smith on September 24, 2007 at 4:52 AM (PDT)
2
Hmm… Still no mention of Canada…
Posted by illegalattempt on September 24, 2007 at 5:42 AM (PDT)
3
So all the suckers paying for bandwidth at the T-Mo hotspot are going to subsidize the free, high-bandwidth music & video downloads. Nice!
Seriously though, I wonder how Starbucks is going to manage this. I would be quite PO’ed if I start getting bandwidth problems on my paid service due to this.
Posted by kokketiel on September 24, 2007 at 6:06 AM (PDT)
4
When are they just going to offer the complete internet free.
How much popular would Starbucks be if they were also the ultimate FREE wifi internet location.
People would probably start spending their entire days there sucking up so much coffee . . .
Paying for wifi is so yesterday.
Posted by Ben O. on September 24, 2007 at 9:32 AM (PDT)
5
Promotions like this make me miss the old Pepsi promotions from several years ago, where 1 in 5 Pepsi caps had a code for a free iTunes song download.
Though with free access to the iTunes Wi-Fi store, I hope this means I’ll just have to go down to my building’s lobby, and go to Starbucks to download the Transformers Movie Score on Oct 9, without having to wait til’ I get home.
Posted by Michael H. on September 24, 2007 at 10:22 AM (PDT)
6
Yeah, Memphis, TN is no where near Seattle or New York. I’ll be waiting forEVER!
Posted by Jason on September 24, 2007 at 6:47 PM (PDT)