Coke adds music

Like it or not, every company is becoming a media company.

There’s two ways to go. Make more media or buy more media. In Coca-Cola’s case, it bought a stake in the streaming music service Spotify.

The investment, along with infusions from the likes of Fidelity Investments, values Spotify at around $3 billion. To put the tectonic shifts in media in perspective, last month Universal Music closed on a deal to buy all of EMI Music for just $1.9 billion.

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 change for a company like Coca-Cola, which has a market capitalization of $162 billion.

But culturally it’s a very big change. Investing in new media sure beats just advertising on it.