Last but not least: spitting sounds instead of coffee

 "A Premium Hot Chocolate Grande and the new Morissette, please!" - It's not just with brown beans, frothy drinks and lots of calories that American coffeehouse giant Starbucks is making a killing. No. Last year, the chain with its 172,000 employees and even in Switzerland soon 40 branches - 15 in Zurich alone - just also sold more than four and a half million records. And although Starbucks is currently struggling with earnings that are well below expectations, sluggish sales and a weakening economy, the music business remains at the heart of the Seattle giant, alongside its return to the bean. However, Starbucks is aiming for a change in strategy in this area: It no longer wants to produce records itself or go in search of new artists to tie up exclusively, but instead focus much more on physical and digital distribution. For example, the soon-to-be-released album by singer Alanis Morissette will be available in all stores. Whether you can buy the group Coldplay's new album there, however, is rather unlikely. The British band, which was the most successful music troupe of 2006 with revenues of over 50 million U.S. dollars, is going the same way as its colleagues from Radiohead (see
), albeit not quite as consistently. The band around frontman and singer Chris Martin is making the first single from their new album available as a free download for a week. The search for good recipes for selling music in the age of the Internet continues. Perhaps coffee machines will soon be playing MP3s, too.