Amazon and Pepsi to Offer Free MP3 Music

Amazon and Pepsi to Offer Free MP3 Music
Amazon and Pepsi have teamed up for a promotional blast and will be giving away up to $1 billion in prizes. The Pepsi Stuff promotion, as it is called, will debut during Super Bowl Sunday (February 3rd), and songs will be redeemable via the AmazonMP3 digital music service. Pepsi Stuff points can be accrued from bottle caps and other specially labeled products – according to the companies involved, 5 bottle caps qualifies for a download. Incidentally, Pepsi did a similar promotion back in 2004 with the iTunes Store. The promotion at that time was also ran during the Super Bowl but on a much smaller scale – a miniscule 100 million songs!
The AmazonMP3 music service has been gaining momentum recently, not only has it teamed up with Pepsi but has also struck a deal with Sony BMG who will be licensing their music to Amazon in the near future. This is obviously another blow for Apple, but don’t feel too sorry for them – the iTunes Store is still king compared to other digital music services.
Having to deal with a multitude of different digital music formats has always been an issue and it’s nice to see some uniformity starting to develop. The trend in the music industry continues to move away from DRM’ed music in favor of MP3; it will be interesting to see if other popular formats eventually get dropped such as WMA. We have already seen this with Napster’s recent announcement.
If you have music on your computer in WMA format and need to know how to convert it to MP3, then be sure to read the WMA to MP3 tutorial.
From Mark Harris,