Before the bell: Stocks to open higher, but Street is cautious

Starting Oct 2, Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) plans to give away 50 million free digital songs to customers in all of its domestic coffee houses until Nov. 7. The giveaway intends to promote a new wireless Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes music service that's about to debut in select markets. At 7:35 a.m., AAPL shares were up 1.29% in premarket trading.

Staying in online music, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today launched its largest-ever single-artist music store for Bruce Springsteen.

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) today announced a deal to launch a retail presence in China by selling computers through the country's biggest chain of electronics stores, Gome Group. The deal could help it compete better with Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) in that market. DELL stock is up nearly 0.6% in premarket action.

According to reports, General Electric (NYSE: GE) and American International Group (NYSE: AIG) have offered effectively zero to Barclays (NYSE: BCS) for the FirstPlus subprime consumer loan unit. BCS shares are down 1% in premarket action. Barclays was also downgraded to Underperform from Peer Perform at Bear Sterns.

European Union regulators will review Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) $3.1 billion takeover bid for online ad tracker DoubleClick. The DoubleClick deal has prompted complaints from rivals Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) as well as from data privacy advocates.

Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) was cleared by the European Commission to market Celsentri, a drug designed for adult patients who have been infected only with and treated for CCR5-tropic HIV-1 virus detectable.

Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) was downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse. Shares are down 1.37% in premarket trading (7:02 a.m.).