Fast Company’s latest cover story is on Starbucks and its ambitions to develop into a media and entertinament giant...something I have written about here before. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is making a big, bold push into the music business. He aims to transform the record industry—and turn Starbucks into the world’s biggest brand, period.

Some details:  This August, Starbucks will install individual music-listening stations, with CD-burning capabilities, in 10 existing Starbucks locations in Seattle. From there, the concept rolls out to Texas in the fall, including Starbucks stores in the music mecca of Austin. With the help of technology partner Hewlett-Packard, Starbucks plans to have 100 coffee shops across the country enabled with Hear Music CD-burning stations by next Christmas, and more than 1,000 locations up and running by the end of 2005. Think iTunes meets Tower Records. With lattes.

Interview with Schultz: “What we’ve demonstrated in Santa Monica in just—I think it’s been open just five or six weeks at this point—is that the sense of discovery, the sense of romance, and the seduction of music is a lost art that we are recreating. If we can leverage that along with Hewlett Packard’s digital technology, with hundreds of thousands of songs digitally filed and stored, these Hear Music coffeehouses combined with our existing locations can become the largest music store in any city that we have a Starbucks in.”