Hear the coffee

I spent two hours at Starbucks last night, checking out the hearmusic store on Santa Monica's 3rd Street Promenade. There are touch screen listening kiosks all over the store for sampling music and adding tracks to your personal playlist. You can burn a CD for a buck a track, or save your playlist onto your Starbucks card for future tinkering. The visual component makes this more interesting then internet listening. You are surrounded by 100's of tempting looking CD's to sample... plus the "we'll burn it for you" (while you have a coffee) convenience... a computer screen just can't compete with that. Still, I'd like to be able to tinker with my playlist from home.

There's a news story about this here.