“Pepsi is giving away 100 million iTunes songs under Pepsi bottlecaps. For some people, winning an “iTune” when they open their Pepsi might be exhilarating. But if you aren’t one of those excitable few, we understand- you didn’t exactly win the lottery. Most people who drink Pepsi don’t use iTunes, so winning a single song means you won a chance to spend 20 minutes downloading, installing, and signing up for a music service that will cost a lot more than your Pepsi habit,” TuneRecycler.com’s website reads.
From TuneRecycler.com:
“A winning Pepsi cap isn’t just a song, it’s a chance to send Pepsi’s 99 cents somewhere good. When a cap is redeemed, Pepsi pays Apple 99 cents for the song, and Apple passes along 65 cents to a record label. Unfortunately, most of the music on iTunes is put out by one of the 5 major record labels, and their business practices are highly suspect. When you buy an iTunes song from a major label, there’s a good chance the artist won’t see a penny, because they’re perpetually in debt to the label. If the artist does get a cut, it’s only about 10 cents from the 99 cents you paid. But we can do better!”
“Don’t throw away that cap, recycle it! When you submit a winning Pepsi code to the Tune Recycler, we’ll redeem it for music from honest, independent labels. There are a few great independent labels in the iTunes store that give their musicians up to 40-50 cents, right from the first sale. When you use the Tune Recycler, you know that no money is going to support price fixing, payola, or lawsuits against families with children–and most importantly, the money goes to a musician. That way, you don’t have to sign up with iTunes to get one song, but you can still put that cap to use.”
Tunerecycler.com’s FAQ states:
Q. I use iTunes, so why should I send you my bottlecap code?
A. You shouldn’t! If you use the iTunes Music Store, we don’t want the cap, you should redeem it yourself. However, we would strongly encourage you to use the cap to buy music that’s not from one of the 5 major labels.
More info here.
MacDailyNews Take: People have issues. Some more than others. Most of our reader are, of course, iTunes users, and happily so. Do you use iTunes and what do you think of this?
damn, wish i thought of it first
I wish I would’ve thought of this first….more free music for me. Nice scam.
Whether you use the Music store or not, just send your cap to me. Really, you can trust me. I will make sure that it gets put to good use.
Who cares if I thought of it first. Antything that can do, I can do bigger.
There are redemption limits – 10 per day and $200 overall is the most any one person/address can redeem.
If you can drink 10 20 oz. Pepsi’s per day for 60 days, with an average of 1-in-3 winning caps, that works out to the maximum $200 worth of songs.
“means you won a chance to spend 20 minutes downloading, installing, and signing up for a music service that will cost a lot more than your Pepsi habit”
Hmmm, <5 minutes to download iTunes for PC users, <1 minute to install it, <5 minutes to get an Apple ID (if you don’t have one already).
That’s 11 minutes, outrageous!! Free songs for 11 minutes of “hard labor”? outrageous!!
I know for PC users, that 11 minutes could be well spent patching and updating virus definitions.
Us Mac users, well, if you have an Apple ID, then it takes < 1 minute to download a song.
And how is this music service going to cost more than a Pepsi habit since there are no monthly fees and such. Can’t really beat 99 cents per song.
I’m wondering what factual support backs up the statement ‘Most people who drink Pepsi don’t use iTunes.”
Probably true. But this is a promotion to get MORE people to use iTunes.
Yeah Curious, I tend to drink Coke, but I know plenty of Mac users who drink Pepsi. That’s like saying “Most people who wear green sweaters are born in September”, or “Most people who use Exxon don’t chew gum”, or “Most people who shop at Wal-Mart don’t wear underoos”…you get the point.
Silly: most people who drink <whatever> don’t use <whatever>. BTW, please buy my mum’s songs!
While the cause is in good faith in support for the artist. Thing is, they got themselves into it and they are getting swollen kickbacks and pay from the Labels and they make more money than you or I will ever see. Why in the hell should I care. As for the indie labels…well there needs to be a category on iTunes that is the Indie Label. Doesn’t iTuneAgent.com do that? Send them feedback if not. I may do that.
I see no problem with promoting independent labels over the big ones. An interesting effort, and it’s not anti-iTunes.
Also, don’t forget that AOL users are ready-to-go with iTunes. No sign-up needed. And 20 MB download isn’t bad on broadband–many people do more than that on modem, overnight, regularly. If what you get is a free, widely-acclaimed, and very cool/fun app–with free music that you might at least want to TRY… then I think non-iTunes people WILL do the download to check this out, and in larger numbers!
11 minutes of your time is worth more than $.99 – I hope.
I also doubt that Pepsi is paying Apple $.99 every time someone redeems a cap. I am sure there is a deal between the two companies to split costs, etc.
There’s a scam born every minute.
“Most people who drink Pepsi don’t use iTunes…”
Nor do they surf the net
or looking for where (else) they can redeem their winnings
This is lame, I’m not giving my bottle caps to some company that bashes iTunes just so they can go use it, and I don’t think anyone else should. Talk about hypocrites…”We don’t like the iTunes Music Store…..but give us your bottle caps so we can get free music from it”
TuneRecycler.com, I’ll be the first to donate a winning code to you. I found some iTunes Pepsi bottles for the first time today at my local convenience store and sure enough I was a winner with the first one I bought.
Here’s my donated winning code from the cap…
E6A9T6S9H6I9T
“11 minutes of your time is worth more than $.99 – I hope.” – Perry
Oh, I don’t know… maybe they could, say, multitask? I mean, while downloading iTunes and the free song, they can work on other things on/off your computer. Of course, if they like to stare at the progress bar, that is another thing.
If you are being sarcastic, disregard this.
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Mai Crowe! Who’s yer mum?
You know, I’d almost give TunesRecycler a thumbs-up for their idea ***if*** they’d only give some idea about what they were doing with the songs. Donating legitimately-downloaded music to a charity, public radio station, college or high school station … something like that. But their bashing of iTMS shows what stooges (and I’m not talking about Iggy’s) they are. Apple has pushed for the same contract terms for all labels, whether the Big 5 or any Indie that signs up. In order to establish a legit means of buying music online in the first place, they HAVE to deal with the Big 5 — these folks have the music people want, after all.
What iTMS is going to allow for is musicians leaving the major labels and still having a viable means of getting their music to the masses. But in order to be able to do that, iTMS has to convince consumers that it is the place to buy music. For now, that means working with the Powers That Be.
I love this. We bash Apple and iTunes Music Store every chance we get, but send us your unredeemed Pepsi caps and we will use our currently active iTunes Music Store accounts, and buy independent music for our own personal use. Yeah. Kick the man!
Don’t these guys get tired of hearing themselves speak. From my position, I’ve been slowly watching Apple create a music revolution. besides the growing number of independent labels and artist available on iTunes; even some big name artist are starting to self-publish their own music to the store. Look at Pearl Jam, Ben Folds, and John Mayer.
And yeah, with the exception of Pearl Jam, who has declared themselves official Big 5 label free, the other acts are probably paying their labels some percentage, but you can pretty much guarantee when contracts are up for renewal “live performances” and “digital recordings” from live performances, EPs, etc. are all going to be rethought by the artist as ways they can get more money directly without going through their label.
I say more power to them. It takes artist to make the industry change. The more big or almost big artist who refuse to sign or resign label contracts, or who make labels include special provisions so they can self-produce or have control over ANY and ALL live performances and digital media produced from them, the more power to goes to the artist and not the label. Eventually, these artist may become like Pearl Jam, Prince, or even Ani Difranco who decide to produce and distribute their own music; and iTunes Music Store has already proven a perfect vehicle for that.
This is what a bunch of young punks come up with when they have nothing to do. So they come up with something dumb like this to make them feel important. See that website they have on why iTunes is such a bad idea? Yep, they stole that from Apple. And they’re advocating using Kazaa and other P2P applications and downloading music for free and telling those users to send the artist a dollar instead? Yeah, right!! We see how successful that has been. And I guess the next thing they’ll say is that the entire retail industry is at fault for the cancer caused by cigarettes because they sold a product by the evil tobacco empire, whose business practices are so evil. Really!
They’re blaming Apple and iTunes for advocating the record label’s stiffing artists on the sale of albums. That’s business. Fair or not. I’d love to see artists get a larger share, but hell, I’d like to get a larger share myself. No one needs millions of dollars, and successful artists are getting more money than they need and more than those punks or the rest of us are making, so I’m not going to join some lame-ass cause for them. Do radio stations get paid for promoting artists and albums? No. Do DJs get filthy rich off of record labels or artists for their role in promoting artists? No. Personally, I think iTunes has done a great job. A LOT of time and effort goes into the iTunes Music Store. Apple deserves a large cut of the profit and has NO obligation or responsibility for what the artists get or don’t get from record labels. Face it, without promotion, artists won’t get noticed and they won’t make anywhere near as much money because they won’t sell if people don’t believe there is something good to their work.
Apple is embracing indies … over 100,000 tracks and that part is growing faster than other parts of itms. Artists get about 65 cents on the dollar if they sign directly.
Apple is offering people some choice here … these guys are pretty lame.
Being that there is a limit on redeeming the caps, they might collect these caps for free and sell them on eBay at a discount. For example: 200 winning caps for $100. They get the cash and the buyer gets 2 songs for the price of 1.
…assuming this is NOT a scam.
Got A winning soda cap it sas FFQNY
9KXHI