Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks announced that starting Oct. 2 it's planning to give its customers more than 50 million songs to download on iTunes. The promotion will see 1.5 million songs given away to customers each day between Oct. 2 and Nov. 7 at all the company-owned coffee shops.

The promotion is actually part of Starbucks' campaign to publicize its iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store which, by the end of next year, will be available in around a quarter of its stores nationwide. The new service will debut in the stores located in the San Francisco Bay area in early November. Starting in early February and March, stores in Los Angeles and Chicago will also be enabled for the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store.

Bob Dylan, Joss Stone, John Mayer, Dave Matthews, KT Tunstall, John Legend, Annie Lennox, Joni Mitchell, Keith Urban, Paul McCartney, Sia, Band of Horses, Hilary McRae, Federico Aubele and Sara Bareilles are among those artists selected by Starbucks to see their tunes given away for free in the "Song of the Day" giveaway.

Customers will reportedly receive iTunes Digital Release Cards which they will be able to redeem on iTunes anytime by the end of this year. Starbucks is not actually paying the labels for the songs it gives away for free. Instead record companies are offering the tracks as part of the promotion.

The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, a partnership between Starbucks and Apple, will allow iPhone and iPod Touch owners to buy and download songs to their devices wirelessly from select Starbucks stores. Customers are to access the iTunes store with no connection fee or hot-spot login. In addition, a cool feature called "Now Playing" will show customers what's playing over the store's sound system and let them buy it from iTunes for the usual flat rate: 99 cents per song. Music will only be available on either Apple systems and players or PCs running Apple's iTunes.

In late July, iTunes, the no. 1 digital music store, has crossed another major milestone by selling over three billion songs. The previous record of two billion songs was achieved in January this year, which means that iTunes sold close to 1 billion songs in just seven months. The iTunes Music Store opened in April 2003 and the one billionth song was purchased in February 2006. Currently, the iTunes catalog features around five million songs, 550 television shows and 500 movies.