Pepsi & iTunes

As I said in the last post, I spent some time at the iTunes Music Store over the past Christmas break searching for songs for my son's new iPod Nano. Luckily, he also received for Christmas, a gift card for the online store. As I entered in his card # to redeem the $15 on it, I was take back to 2004 when Apple and Pepsi teamed together to give away one million songs at the iTunes Music Store after the Super Bowl. During this promotion, codes for one free song were printed at the under the bottle caps of one in three Pepsi bottles. I thought back to how after entering in each code, your credit to your account would increase by one song, or $1.00. I wondered whether they were gearing up to do the same promotion by any chance since the Super Bowl is coming up relatively soon.

I did another little Google search (makes me wonder what I ever did without Google) and discovered that Pepsi has dropped Apple in favor of Amazon MP3. Now I had no idea whatsoever that Amazon was in the .MP3 business, but apparently they are. So, I did a little more research and playing around. I created an Amazon MP3 account for myself, downloaded and installed the Downloader software, and tried downloading a song for the first time.

There were a few cool things about doing this: One, the song was completely compatible with iTunes, so as soon as it downloaded, it played in iTunes. It even downloads the album artwork! Two, just like the iTunes Music Store you can preview the song prior to purchasing it. Three, it seems that the prices for these songs (especially if you a buying entire albums) are cheaper than iTunes.

Now it seems that I have yet another reason to look forward to the Super Bowl. (If the New England Patriots being in it wasn't enough of a reason.)