No Rock And Roll Fun

IGNORE IT, IT'S JUST A MIXER: Having successfully overseen the transformation of football from a muddy, rough sport and obsession into a prime-positioned marketing tool, Coke really is planning on doing the same to music. With the bubbles from the Top 40 sponsorship deal still bursting in the soft flesh of our noses, Coke is trumpeting its soon-to-launch download site - it's promising a quarter of a million tracks (although it won't say which or by whom, which makes us smell an attempt to try and buy some leverage in negotiations) and it hasn't said what format they'll be in. But the bottle cap has been thrown into the ring.

Curiously, the need to own a credit or debit card means they'll automatically be excluding an enormous segment of the online, music-loving audience, the under-18s.

Coke claim that people have been telling them that they find downloading music "confusing" - thank god it wasn't any simpler, eh, BPI, else everyone would be at it? - and they've been told that people want simple, legal downloads from a "brand they trust." But they've decided to have a crack at it nevertheless.