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As surely everyone by now knows, Manhattan is overgrown with Starbucks. There’s one on almost every block. This made checking out today’s launch of the Starbucks-iPhone-iTunes Music store a cinch.

At lunch therefore I wandered out of my office and across the street to the nearest green vitrine. As I opened the door, I tapped to turn on my wi-fi and stepped into.  .  .yes. . . .Minority Report.

I’m surprised the chairs didn’t greet me by name, actually. Seriously, the Starbucks-iTunes-iPhone integration feels that futuristic the first time you use it. As Steve would say "Pretty cool, huh?"

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

No sooner than I took a half-step into the door, iPhone had found and connected to the T-Mobile Starbucks network. I tapped the purple iTunes icon, and iTunes instantly loaded — I mean instantly, I thought I heard Einstein scream as the speed of light was broken — with a Starbucks music page.

At the top was a feature highlighting the current song, which at that moment happened to be Keith Urban. I’m not a fan, so I scanned down to see the 5 or 6 categories of music available.

As I did so, I immediately noticed that the normal menu at the
bottom of iTunes was a little different. In addition to the normal
Featured, Top Ten, Search, and Downloads, there was a new Starbucks
logo icon on the far left!

Just for giggles, I tapped on the Keith Urban song then playing, and
immediately went to a purchase screen where I could tap a button next
to the song name to buy it for US$0.99. Not being a fan of country, I
passed that opportunity by and instead tapped the recently played to
see what the peeps had been grooving to before I arrived.

The list included Alison Krauss, Kathleen Edwards, Julia Fordham, and Cat Power.
(I’m more a Cat Power person myself.) I have to say the iTunes loaded
with amazing rapidity and the interface looked great, besides being as
intuitive and easy-to-use as we’d expect.

I looked up and realized that I was still standing in the doorway
like a stupid geek. So I stepped to the side and looked around,
thinking surely the place would be over-run with 10,000
highly-caffeinated song-downloading maniacs. But no.

I appeared to have the only iPhone in the place. Then I noticed a
rather discreet sign stuck to the side of a post announcing the debut
of the music store. Not exactly in-your-face marketing here.

I apologized as I shoved my way through the tables crowded with
tourists and tried to get a semi-decent pic with iPhone, which was a
bit difficult as the multi-colored mood lighting there is more for
relaxing than photography.

But here it is: The debut of the Starbucks iTunes store.

I’m not the biggest fan of the Starbucks sound,
but my initial review of this interesting feature is positive: it
works, it’s easy to use, it loads faster than lightning and there’s a
fair variety of choice. Job well done!

I assume we’ll shortly see similar marketing integrations for places like Gap, Borders and Target pretty quick.