A Pilgrim’s Digression

In advance of the Super Bowl this Sunday, Apple and Pepsi are again collaborating on selling Pepsi products and giving away iTunes songs.

I bought my first Diet Pepsi with an iTunes cap just today, a full week ahead of when the promotion was supposed to begin.

And no, my cap was not a winner. No big surprise there. Last year, I found out that the 1 in 3 odds of winning a free song were a bit inaccurate. My odds were more like one in five. Even so, I still managed to win nearly fifty songs, though I now have diabetes, I weigh four-hundred and thirty pounds, and I piss pure caramel syrup.

The contest is a little different this year. Under the cap, one will find either a “Please Play Again,” a coupon for a free Pepsi, or a code to enter at the iTunes music store for a free song. Just an observation, but it seems like Pepsi has addressed the problem of people sneaking a peak under the caps before buying the Pepsis. No matter how I turned the bottle, no matter the angle of my head as I intently tried to divine my fortunes through that opaque, distorted bottle of plastic, I could not tell in advance whether I was a winner or not.

The addition of a chance to win an iPod mini is also a new feature of the contest. Last year, there were complaints from some areas of the country that yellow-capped Pepsi products were hard to come by, and imbibers of Mountain Dew were completely out of luck. This year, at least one of those problems has been addressed: tipplers of the Dew will also have a chance to win a free song. Whether the bottles with iTunes caps are better distributed by Pepsi is another story.