Amazon Beats Apple For Super Bowl ‘Berth’
In a Super Bowl commercial four years ago featuring the music of Green Day, a promotion between the major record labels, PepsiCo and Apple was unveiled to give away 100 million songs through a then-fledgling iTunes. Now, four years later, the Pepsi promotion is back and they’ve dropped Green Day and Apple in favour of JT (Justin Timberlake) and Amazon.
As reported by Jeff Leeds of The New York Times, “the switch is an indicator of the continuing tension between the music industry and Apple.” Pepsi’s previous Super Bowl ad encouraged music fans to ditch their pirating ways in favour of legal purchases and led to iTunes’ eventual dominance as the leading digital-music store. In a twist of irony, however, the music industry has taken a liking to Amazon’s rival music service, introduced in September, and is teaming up with Pepsi to shake the scene up a bit.
All the controversy surrounds DRM, or digital rights management software. Though it was Apple CEO Steve Jobs who, in February, called on the industry to drop its perpetual insistence that the software be used citing DRM’s failure to rein in piracy, the major record companies still require Apple to sell their music wrapped in the software. Amazon’s service will gain an enormous edge: the companies have agreed to offer their music catalogs for sale in the MP3 format, without the digital locks that restrict users from making copies of the songs.
DRM has been accused by some consumers of creating confusing problems, such as a lack of compatibility between most songs and the devices sold by Apple and Microsoft. Apple sells all single tracks for 99 cents, while Amazon sells them from 89 cents and up.
