Well irradiate our noses and call us Rudolph-- MyCokeMusic.com is real. Not that there was any particular reason to doubt it, of course, other than the sheer weirdness factor of a soft drink company launching its own music download service, but we admit a certain guts-level inability to process the information ever since the original announcement was made last month. But whatever, 'cause it's here, and now Coca-Cola is supplying the British with sugary pop and sugary pop. Bring on the first wave of seemingly inappropriately-branded music download services! How long until BeefaroniTunes is online? Or ViagraBeats? (We can smell the spam already.)

That said, the launch of Coke's download service wasn't without its hiccups; faithful viewer Tepeka tipped us off to a BBC News article which reports that MyCokeMusic.com was "shut down for much of its first two days due to technical problems." The nature of the "technical problems" isn't discussed (perhaps some of the hamsters refused to run in their little wheels), but whatever the issues were, they were "compounded by the fact that support staff in the US were not in their offices because it was a national holiday there." That's right, guys; blame it all on Martin Luther King. And besides, since this is a UK-only service, what's with the support staff being in the U.S. anyway? Aren't these sorts of things supposed to be outsourced to India these days?

Needless to say, Steve Jobs is probably feeling pretty smug right about now-- more than usual, even. You might recall that he's told the press on more than one occasion that building a solid music download service is hard, and that most of the companies leaping on the iTunes bandwagon were going to find that out the hard way. With Coke's service off more than on for the first two days of its big launch, right now we imagine he's wearing nothing but a grin and a t-shirt that says I TOLD YOU SO. In fact, with so many other services slated to spring up in the near future, we wouldn't be surprised if he goes to get that phrase tattooed permanently across his forehead just to simplify his wardrobe planning. (As soon as he puts on some pants, of course.)

But hey, we have to concede one point: Coke does have a download service running in the UK, which is more than we can say for Apple right now. Granted, all Coke did was rebrand Peter Gabriel's existing OD2 service (and it still had technical problems-- go figure), and obviously Apple doesn't want to do that, so it's taking a while for the licensing issues to get hammered out, but we feel pretty confident that when the iTunes Music Store does make it across the pond, it won't be offline for most of its first two days out of the gate.

Meanwhile, who knew that caramel-colored caffeinated beverages cause delusions of innovation? Check out what a Coke spokesperson (Cokesperson?) had to say about the glitches: "As you can appreciate, being the first to do this and working with new technology there are a few teething problems." First to do this? Even if he meant "first in the UK," we were under the impression that OD2 already runs music download services for HMV and Virgin out in those parts. Who knew that Mike Dell is now moonlighting as a spokesperson for Coca-Cola's UK branch? Man, that must be a nasty commute.

Speaking of song downloads tied to brown fizzy sugar water, if you scope out a calendar you'll notice that February is less than two weeks away-- which means that the Pepsi-iTunes giveaway is gearing up to take over the planet. You remember this deal, right? Back in October Apple announced that Pepsi would give away 100 million free songs via the iTunes Music Store, which is, if you think about it, a whole lotta music-- possibly more than the entire ABBA discography. Come February 1st, Pepsi will disgorge 300 million specially-marked bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and Sierra Mist (sorry, folks, no Mountain Dew; faithful viewer Terry Dunham plans to lead the protest), and one in three bottles will contain a winning claim code under the cap. Oooh, it's like Vegas, only with a far greater risk of diabetes!

Well, Apple has put up a teaser page which reveals what's likely to be the promotion's tag line ("more than pop") and includes a signup form so you can receive a reminder by email when the giveaway begins. Now, being Apple freaks, none of us really needs an email reminder to know when the sugar shock commences, but we signed up anyway just so we'd be absolutely sure to stock up on insulin before we start chugging our way to iTunes heaven-- and we're glad we did, because there's a little extra info on the "Thank You" page. The first lil' nugget-o'-fun is a reminder to "watch for our ads during the Superbowl," which isn't news, since we all knew that Pepsi was going to advertise the promotion during the Big Game, but we find the use of the word "our" interesting. The second is that winning prize codes must be redeemed "by 4/30/04," so make sure you don't sit on those caps for too long.

The third is the jackpot: a link to the official rules of the promotion, which faithful viewer Mitchell Elliott was bored enough to read. He notes that the "maximum number of valid Codes per email address/person that can be entered at the Web Site is 10 per day and 200 total throughout the Promotion Period." Now this, you'll surely agree, is somewhat disappointing; here we were all geared up to gulp down obscene amounts of sugar water and now we discover that we're limited to ten songs per day. With one-in-three odds, that amounts to only 30 bottles daily at 20 ounces apiece, or 4.7 gallons of soda a day and 94 gallons total. It's almost like Apple's trying to prevent clogging the country's emergency rooms with teens in hyperglycemic shock or something.

Well, whatever; even though we can only claim 200 free songs ourselves, we suppose we could always give extras to friends and family, or even auction them off on eBay. (You just know someone's going to, despite the "no transfer of prize to a third party permitted" clause.) Hey, it beats drinkin' water.

Regular viewers with access to a reasonably functional long-term memory (oooh, how we envy you-- do you happen to remember where we left our mittens? The fuzzy red ones with the penguins on them? No? Well, thanks anyway) may recall that, after noticing a Newsweek interview with El Stevo last October in which he talked exclusively about iPods and iTunes and never mentioned the Mac even once, we expressed a vague concern that Apple was focusing a bit too heavily on the music side of the business at the expense of that whole Mac thing. It wasn't a big deal, really; just us boosting the drama ratio, as usual. We got a lot of mail that week accusing us of being paranoid (as if that's a bad thing?) and assuring us that Apple's primary focus would always be the Mac, if for no other reason than its massive contribution to the company's revenues.

Well, not that we were all that serious when we broadcast that scene, but do you suppose Steve will let us borrow his I TOLD YOU SO t-shirt if we ask really nicely and say "pretty please" and maybe give him a sticker? Because faithful viewer mrmgraphics forwarded us a MacMinute blurb which in turn references a Reuters article about how the makers of musical instruments are hoping that GarageBand boosts sales, and in it, Apple veep of applications marketing Rob Schoeben candidly admits that "for us, all of a sudden, music is the No. 1 priority of the company." (Ooooh, you just know that The Beatles' lawyers are writing that one down as evidence.)

That's right, folks: music, Apple's number one priority. No wonder the last Stevenote was two hours of John Mayer and miniPods with nary a new Mac in sight (unless you count the twelve seconds Steve grudgingly set aside for the introduction of the G5 Xserves). The iPod may be a relatively small slice of Apple's revenue pie for now, and the iTunes Music Store may be barely breaking even, but that isn't stopping the company from throwing a whole lotta manpower at the whole music thing in hopes of staying a few dozen hundred thousand steps ahead of the competition. And it's certainly justifiable from a raw numbers standpoint, too; since iTunes is now available for Windows, it's GarageBand that might attract a few Wintellians to the Mac side of the force. So, no complaints from us, as long as the Mac fits squarely into the whole music strategy and doesn't turn into an afterthought. After all, we wouldn't want something like, oh, say, Mac quality control to suffer, right?

By the way, we're getting lots of mixed comments on GarageBand (most of the complaints are from buyers who didn't read the system requirements and don't have a DVD-ROM drive with which to install it), but personally, it rocks our world something fierce. AtAT broadcasts are only going to get even more ridiculously late now that we've discovered that the Arena Rock virtual amp and a looped drum track are roughly equivalent to hooking electrodes directly into the pleasure centers of the brain; in addition to the time suck factor, it's hard to type with bleeding fingers. But hey, that's rock 'n' roll.