I was all set to write a story about Pepsi’s latest “buy a lot of soda and we’ll give you something of much lesser value for the bottlecaps” promotion, which is going to allow users to swap their tops for MP3s at Amazon’s digital-music store and be advertised via a Super Bowl commercial featuring Justin Timberlake (what, no Janet Jackson?), and how maybe using Timberlake to promote this when he hasn’t put out an album in nearly a year and a half isn’t exactly the best way to get people excited about expanding their digital-music libraries. But flogging nearly dead horses is the least of the music industry’s problems, as evidenced by this quote hidden deep in this Times story on the Amazon-Pepsi alliance:

A senior executive at another record company, who requested anonymity out of concern about irritating Mr. Jobs, said he was prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label’s songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself.

Oooh, burn! Of course, it probably never crossed this executive’s mind that holding those tracks back from iTunes doesn’t necessarily mean that a user is going to run to Amazon because they really, really want their music to be free of digital-rights management. (From the story: “Russ Crupnick, an analyst at the NPD Group, joked that D.R.M. should stand for ‘doesn’t really matter.’ “) As another analyst interviewed by Jeff Leeds pointed out, iPods are where the real money is for Apple, and not only are they available at Amazon anyway, those DRM-free files Amazon sells? Work on iPods. So basically all the record companies have done is added a middleman while getting people acquainted with paying 89 cents for single tracks of digital music, instead of the 99-cent price point that was “too low” for the bigwigs. Nice work, guys! Seriously, is all you need to be a record executive these days some old comic books and the sense of entitlement you had when you first read them as a young tot?

Free Song Promotion Is Expected From Amazon [NYT]
[Photo: Getty]