Now Bay Area Starbucks shops offer free iTunes access

…
The new service lets customers shop for music wirelessly through iTunes at Starbucks for free.

…
The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store operates on the new iPod Touch, iPhone and Wi-Fi-enabled PCs and Macs using one of the latest versions of iTunes. Users are automatically connected to the coffee shop’s wireless Internet network and can see – and purchase – the song that’s currently playing in the store. Each coffee shop is configured individually so that the song piped through the store’s speakers is the same song that appears on the front page of the user’s iTunes.
…
The free wireless Internet access also only applies to the iTunes Store. Consumers still need to pay to access any other parts of the Web through Starbucks’ partnership with T-Mobile.

This is just terrible writing. Access to the iTunes store is free? How is that newsworthy? There’s news to be had here, but spinning up the free angle is just ludicrous. Did the journalist just swallow the press release and not really think about what new service was? Need they also point out that Starbucks provides free parking, restrooms, and now oxygen?

You can (with a single download) get 739 mp3s by 739 artists from the SXSW festival. That’s a lot of music. As someone points out
on MetaFilter that’s over 37 hours of music. Someone else bemoans the organizational task that will create (I’m about to do that task myself).

I downloaded about half as many songs last year, and I really enjoyed them, but it’s an intimidating-if-wonderful gift.

Our digital technologies and the massive capabilities they afford us still continue to exceed or at least push the edges of our capacity as consumers. Indeed, the word consume may hold a clue. Do we consume music? Eat it up, digest it, and excrete/delete when we are done, or are we collectors, accumulating more and more? I imagine many of us are in straddle positions, not being ready to delete an MP3, or many MP3s, because we already possess them.

Update: am slowly working through listening to the songs…some real quality control issues with their distribution. One track with a skip in it, and about two dozen that are seriously truncated.

Our Courtyard by Marriott in Houston had a nice little freebie – they would take a business card and laminate it into a luggage tag, while you waited. I appreciated the free thing and I got a kick out of the fact that it was travel-related; it reinforced the experience you were having with them. Just a clever customer service thing that someone decided to do.