If you missed seeing this Pepsi/Apple ad yesterday during the Superbowl, the new joint promotion between Pepsi and the Apple iTunes music store is that 1 in 3 Pepsi bottle caps has a code that you can use in the iTunes music store to download one free song.

About the Ad

Its decent ad, features a collection of "young" people who the RIAA has filed lawsuits against for downloading music. In the ad a girl claims "we're still going to download music free off the internet". The music for the ad has lyrics saying "I fought the law and the law won". And text that reads: "STARTING TODAY, PEPSI & iTunes WILL GIVE AWAY 100 MILLION FREE SONGS... LEGALLY".

About the Promotion

There's only one type of person that will be redeeming these bottle caps: Pepsi drinker + iTunes user. For Pepsi drinkers alone, they will just throw the bottle caps away. And for iTunes users alone, you will have to change your drinking preferences, at least until the promotion ends. And for everyone else (and I fall into this category), we would have to change both how we download/organize/play our music and what we drink. Even though the odds of getting a winning bottle cap are pretty good, I probably wont do this.

About Recycling your iTunes Bottle Caps

iTunes pays musicians for every song downloaded, so Apple/Pepsi can't really just give away songs without making sure the Labels/Artists are paid for the download. Rumors are that Pepsi is fronting the bill, probably due to that Pepsi plans for 80-90% of the bottle caps to go unredeemed.

Enter TuneRecycler.com. If you happen to fall into the category of you drink Pepsi, but don't use iTunes, you can donate your codes to the site, and they will use the codes to support "independent music". I like the idea of some project out there trying to support independent artist on-line. So props to this site.