The annual US Super Bowl sporting event goes out to a huge TV audience and is much coveted by advertisers, who routinely break all budgets to do a prime-time shill for their products, writes Brian Boyd.
The fabulously refreshing Pepsi coloured sugar drink has been one of the main Super Bowl advertisers over the past few years, and in 2004 they entered into a high-profile "synergy" deal with the then nascent iTunes to promote Apple's MP3 site.
At the time, each bottle of Pepsi bought came with a few free vouchers for iTunes downloads.
There will be a symbolic changing of the guard at next month's Super Bowl, when Pepsi enters into a similar download deal, this time with Amazon. com's new music download store. Amazon's service debuted last September but has yet to have any real "market impact".
So all concerned hope the Super Bowl slot will reposition Amazon as a serious rival to iTunes. More than one billion downloads for the Amazon site will be given away free (when you buy a bottle of Pepsi) over the next few months.
There's a good reason why iTunes still controls 80 per cent of the download market. It's a remarkably easy service to use, and Apple's MP3 players are nifty little gadgets. All other competitors have struggled over the years, but this full-on assault by Amazon may well mean that iTunes, for the first time, has a download market fight on its hands.
Amazon has an awful lot going for it. The company already has a base of more than 70 million customers world-wide. Many use the site regularly to buy CDs, and a fair proportion have Amazon accounts. The retailer also has reams and reams of consumer data and will use its recommendation engines to push consumers every step of the digital download way.
Amazon has already got the four major record labels to agree to supply it with DRM-free music catalogues. Digital Rights Management is still a real issue for downloaders. Basically, if you purchase a DRM-free track online, it means that you can play it on virtually any portable device (phone, computer, etc) and not just an MP3 player.
This is not the current situation with iTunes. Of the four major labels, only EMI has agreed to supply iTunes with DRM-free music. The others have refused because of their unhappiness with certain aspects of iTunes, such as pricing. In theory, DRM is designed to prevent unauthorised copying of music. But for consumers who couldn't care less about what DRM stands for, let alone means, it's just an irritant.
Ironically, it is Apple's Steve Jobs who has led the charge for DRM-free music - and way before Amazon's new site was unveiled. In an open letter to the music industry last year, Jobs argued that DRM-free music would expand the digital market for everyone.
Jobs is reportedly incandescent with rage about how the major labels have now got into a DRM-free bed (so to speak) with a rival service. It is significant that all of the four majors are giving the Amazon service such a boost, and the move is seen as a two- fingered gesture to iTunes.
It's not as if the major labels have consumers' best interests at heart (although removing DRM is a welcome step). What's really happened here is that the majors have long been worried about iTunes's dominance of the MP3 market. Apple's command of the market meant that it had a lot of control over prices.
By giving such a boost to Amazon, the majors are hoping that the new service will cut into Apple's market and make it behave a bit more reasonably (as they would see it) in its dealings with the labels.
Amazon vs. Apple - this could be a lot of fun.
