Geez, what is it with beverages and digital music, anyway? You all know about the Pepsi tie-in with iTunes, and indeed many of you have distilled the art of scoring free song downloads into a hardcore science. (Tilting, shmilting-- we really like that some of you are shining super-bright LED flashlights through the caps of unopened bottles and reading the printing like you've got x-ray vision. Lex Luthor called; you qualify for membership in the Evil Genius Society.) Then there's Coca-Cola, which actually launched its own downloadable music store in the UK. And now, just to keep the trend rolling, omnipresent java chain Starbucks is getting into the act, too. Potable liquids and digital songs; who knew?

According to an article in BusinessWeek, Starbucks has teamed up with none other than Hewlett-Packard to hook up a "songs-to-go" service in selected locations. When the system goes live, apparently you'll be able to browse through a library of 250,000 songs on a borrowed Tablet PC (wow, someone's finally going to buy one!), sample the selection through a pair of headphones, purchase any songs you like along with your cup o' joe, and the barista can foam your milk while burning your selected tunes to a CD for you to take home.

So, wait-- is this a rebranded and specialized front-end to the iTunes Music Store or not? At first we figured it probably was, since HP is in on the Starbucks deal; as you all know, HP joined itself at the hip to Apple a little while back with the agreement to preload iTunes on all HP and Compaq home computers and sell corpse-blue HP-rebranded iPods, which are themselves joined at the hip to the iTMS. And then Hal Gaba (co-owner of Concord Records) is quoted in the article as saying that the Starbucks music thing is "a significant enhancement of the iTunes experience," which implies at least a little that the setup is an applied extension of Apple's store.

Dig a little deeper, though, and it becomes very clear that whatever this thing is, it's not powered by iTunes. For one thing, it has a song catalog half the size, and Starbucks apparently had to negotiate its own "licensing agreements with most of the major record labels." For another, BusinessWeek opines that "Starbucks will have to keep a wary eye on its digital competitors such as Apple's iTunes." Read up on it a little and you have to bend your mind back to those ancient days of yore when music only came on CDs. The Starbucks music service won't allow you to load your purchases directly onto an iPod or any other portable MP3 player, or even onto your laptop; all they'll give you is a CD. The upshot, of course, is that-- from a technical standpoint, at least-- the separation from the iTMS is irrelevant; Starbucks is selling custom-burned mix CDs, not music downloads.

We imagine it's possible that Apple might feel hurt that HP has entered into a non-iTMS-based digital music partnership, but we doubt it, since the Starbucks thing is unlikely to put even a ding in iTMS sales. They cater to very different audiences, after all; iTMS customers want instantaneous digital music for their computers and iPods, while people who use the Starbucks service will probably be java hounds making caffeine-fueled impulse buys because compiling a mix CD is a nifty way to kill time during the latest coffee infusion. Heck, we'll probably give it a whirl ourselves. We have to occupy ourselves somehow while we anxiously await beverage-centric digital music initiatives from Yoo-hoo, V8, and SunnyD.