The latte paradox: Coffee wakes you up, but living in a monoculture puts you to sleepThe encroaching domination of Starbucks took a minor blow today -- yay! XM Radio and the coffee monolith have dissolved their partnership, which had apparently been less advantageous for the growing satellite radio company than they'd expected. So: gone forever is the creepiness of being able to tune into what was basically the coffee chain's artfully crafted Muzak from any XM-equipped radio. Now all we have to worry about, in terms of cultural vanilla-latteization, are the coffee chain's music label and their incredibly influential featured-book program. Yeah, only those things.
Links:
[1] http://idolator.com/343208/the-rich-frothy-dream-is-over--xm--starbucks-break-up
[2] http://www.hearmusic.com/
[3] http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=736