Apple's iTMS will offer Starbucks music, according to Macnn.com. Big news. But I think bigger news will come as a result of this partnership.

Remember when Starbucks started selling music? It was an awkward but clearly successful way to market music. Starbucks had thousands of stores and millions of customers. That part of the music-selling equation made sense. But to people like me, buying music at a Starbucks didn't make a lot of sense.

For the most part, I was wrong. Starbucks still sells music, and they've woven music deeply into the corporate brand.

So, the move to the online iTMS makes complete sense. Now Starbucks sells music on and offline. That's quite different than selling music to coffee-buying customers when they visit a Starbucks location and actually have time enough to sample and then buy (and at one point burn a custom CD). This adds both logic and convenience as well as a larger pool of potential customers to the Starbucks Hear Music model.

But as I said above, I think something larger is brewing (I punned!). I think it might have something to do with the kiosks I've been asking Apple to create.

These kiosks would distribute iTMS content when people are out of reach of an Internet connection. Music, movies, TV, podcasts, etc, all available from a kiosk that works a little like a jukebox:

Select, pay, load, go.

Apple will design the interface to mirror that of iTunes', but they will enhance it with other stuff like location specific branding. Right, that's where Starbucks comes in (but is not limited to Starbucks, of course). The promotional aspect of this relationship is enormous.

What if, for example, Starbucks wants to offer a free song from the Hear Music campaign with the purchase of a Starbucks coffee? Before it might have been a little unwieldy, but with a iTMS kiosk it will be faster to put a song on the customer's iPod than it will be to make their coffee drink.

And speaking of iPods, I think Apple will start selling iPods in Starbucks locations as well. This isn't an earth shattering idea, but it is yet one more way Apple can maintain its dominance. It's also a great way to reach a clientele with insane brand loyalty.

Back to music and coffee. According the Wikipedia, there are over 10,000 locations.. And it's not just the shear number of locations that Apple loves, it's where these Starbucks stores are located. Location, location, location.

There are Starbucks around the world. They're in malls. They're in grocery stores. In gas stations. They're in airports.

Kiosks in airports is an idea I've posted about before. Millions of people fly, and millions of these people have iPods. Getting content at the last-minute could add millions of dollars to Apple's bottom line. But the one flaw I see in my kiosks airport idea is actually solved with this relationship with Starbucks.

I think, purely speculative, that Steve Jobs would rather die than drop thousands of kiosks around the globe to stand all by themselves. He's focused on the user's experience, so stand alone kiosks are missing the key ingredients in this formula.

Enter the Apple Retail Stores. User, or more specifically, the Mac buyer's experience before the ARS was pathetic. Pathetic, and I'm being generous. Mac lovers bought Macs in Mac-hostile retail environments because of their loyalty, not because of a pleasant and informative buying experience. Steve Jobs fixed that problem in the larger Apple Computer strategy with the Apple Retail Store.

Why not, then, put the kiosks in ARSes? There's just not enough of them to make this make sense.

Enter Starbucks. There are thousands of Starbucks. It's crazy how many stores there are. In some areas there's one on every other block. I bet there are a few areas within certain cities where there might be one Starbucks on every block.

Not only are there thousands of Starbucks locations, but these stores are designed to be customer-killers, just like the Apple Retail Stores are customer-killers. I use this phrase in the most positive manner possible. Customer-killer retail means that every last detail has been scripted to heighten the customer's desire to purchase what the store has to offer. Coffee. Fine. Computers. Fine. Digital content. Fine.

One more thing: Starbucks has WiFi, but that's not fast enough to move movies quickly, and most Starbucks customers aren't bringing their computers in the stores with them. They need the kiosk to move the data. Even WiFi-enabled Zunes couldn't and wouldn't work well because of the speed and the learning curve required on behalf of the customer. A wired connection, read dock, is the killer feature here.

The bottom line is this: I think Starbucks is the only entity with a brand image and a retail environment that Steve Jobs would be comfortable putting these iTunes "Digital Retail" kiosks in.


In the famous words of a band that hates Apple: "Let it be."

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