Always keen to develop the Starbucks experience, the Seattle-based coffee house has partnered with Hewlett-Packard to give customers an innovative music product – personalised CDs burned to order.
We’ve all seen services offering tailor-made CDs before, where this service is different is in the customer interface. This one uses HP tablet PCs (and thankfully, headphones) so that punters can chose can choose from 250,000 licensed tracks and have a CD or two made up for them from their selection.
This could finally be a success for custom CDs – many initiatives in the past have failed because customers don’t really like standing in front of a kiosk for half an hour choosing tracks from a limited selection. Lounging around in a well-worn sofa drinking coffee and picking favourites from a library of a quarter of a million tunes is much more appealing.
A further benefit will be that customers to Starbucks will get more exposure to legal downloads and may be tempted to try similar services such as iTunes when they get home.
The service will be available in selected US branches from 16th March – if any DigLif readers get a chance to try it out, please drop us an email and let us know how you found it.