Would like some tunes with your Coke?

With more than 230 (legal) music download sites hovering in the margins of obscurity already, someone at MyCokeMusic decided we need an Irish arm of the store to rival the efforts from Eircom and iTunes.

Sugar-water shiller Coca-Cola hooked its star to the music download site in the UK 12 months ago (and it promptly fell flat on its first day), and now a year later that we've got the Irish version - even though you could buy tracks in Ireland from the UK store anyway (unlike - grrr - iTunes).

It appears to be a clone of all other stores (such as the Eircom Music Store, HMV, MSN, etc) which are based on the OD2 system set up by Peter Gabriel. So it's Windows Media files only (not compatible with Macs and iPods, for instance) and uncompetitive track prices of €1.29.

In its favour, full tracks can be streamed for just one cent (a much better way to consider a song for purchase than the standard 30-second free clip) and there's nothing to stop you burning songs to CD and then ripping them into MP3 to import onto an iPod. There are also 30 million promotional Coke cans and bottles apparently in circulation in Ireland (North and South) with credits for one download attached.

MyCokeMusic claims a catalogue of more than 500,000 tracks (iTunes has 700,000, Napster has one million) but a very quick check tonight found several songs which you could stream but not download.