Promotional Singles

The CNET headline reads “Pepsi’s iTunes promotion goes flat.” And an Apple flak is quoted as saying they hoped for more than the claimed 5 million digital songs redeemed from Pepsi bottle tops.

This is silly. Let me tell you, heads would have rolled at Pepsi if the company really had to cough up royalties for 100 million downloads. This ain’t like coupons, which are used by CPGs to make quarterly sales figures. This was pure branding for Pepsi, and for Apple, too, if they’d admit it.

As Niki points out, and as I did in a research report, promotional singles are a great thing, both for branding and building digital music awareness. We’ll see if they actually lead to jukebox platform proliferation.

We will be digging into this topic at Plug.IN, and in a future report this year.