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.