Soft Drink Giant Signals Growing Interest In Music, Tech With Latest Investment

As had been rumored for about a month, the New York Times is this evening confirming that Coca-Cola has tacked on a $10 million investment to its existing marketing partnership with fast growing streaming music service, Spotify. The move signals the soft drink's intent to make serious investments in both music and social media as its battle with Pepsi rapidly expands to new venues beyond the grocery aisle, convenience store or TV.

From Media Decoder:

The deal clarifies Coke’s involvement with Spotify. In April, it made a vague announcement about a marketing partnership with Spotify, with few details other than a promise to help the service reach new markets around the world. Spotify, which was founded in Sweden in 2006, came to the United States last year and is now in 17 countries; this week it opened in Ireland and Luxembourg.

An investment of $10 million or so would be small for a company like Coca-Cola, which has a market capitalization of $162 billion. But it is a step toward technology investment for Coke, and it represents a potentially huge new pool of investment sources for digital music.

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