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Apple's 500 Million Songs
Paul H. writes "Apple is giving away an iPod Mini and a 50-song gift card to whomever purchases every 100,000th song on iTunes, until they reach 500 million downloads. The person who downloads the 500 millionth song wins 10 free iPods, a gold 10,000-song gift card, and 10 additional 50-song gift cards for the iPods. To top it off, the winner gets 4 first row Coldplay tickets with back-stage passes."
Just because something is free doesn't mean that it's valueless.
just pawn em on ebay, 100% profit which you can pump into songs, or whatever you want.
Why not give away a nice Dual G5 system with the 30 inch cinema display instead of 10 iPods. What would you do with 10 iPods anyway? I mean 1 or 2 iPod's would be nice but 10??
The iPods aren't free. Neither are concert tickets. The songs aren't free either, just very cheap from Apple's point of view. They still pay bandwidth fees and likely will have to count them as songs sold for royalty purposes.
Besides, in things like this it isn't the value of the prize to the company that is important, it is the value of the prize to the winner or game-players that matters. Clearly you don't care and therefore you are not their target audience with this event.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Not sure I'd want to win this. You get what "$10K" worth of music, $3K worth of ipods, probably a grand for the concert stuff. Boom - you owe the IRS 20% of $14000.
Rumor had it that they had overstocked their inventory of iPods and needed to get rid of them. Is this just a quiet way of getting rid of them through promotions and suckering people into buying songs? Sounds like it to me.
Nah, Apple isn't that generous. They've sold something like 450M songs to date, so they still have 50M to go before they hit the 500M jackpot. One iPod for every 100K songs, and a 10 iPod mega prize adds up to only 510 give-away iPods. Apple sells a couple million iPods a year, so I don't think 510 is going to make a dent in any sort of inventory they might have.
Let's see how much this promotion would cost Apple:
500 million / 100,000 songs = 500 winners
500 winners * (50 songs * $0.80 per song + $100 per iPod mini) = $70,000
Gold gift card = $8,000
10 iPods = $1,000
Coldplay tickets = $0 cuz Coldplay is teh suck.
Total cost = $79,000, considerably less than a single 30-second prime time spot.
So Apple thanks you for the free advertising on this highly read online forum!
Well, sure you'd rather win something worth $150k than $9,900, which is what 10,000 songs costs. They're not claiming it's worth untold millions.
The marginal cost to Apple may be small, but 10,000 songs are still 10,000 songs, and they're worth something to you, assuming you listen to music. The music's pretty tangible.
The marginal cost may be zero, but the amortized cost is not. They can't give you the next song without having paid for the servers, the software, the music studios, the advertising, etc.
If your goal is not so much to have stuff as to make make sure you're socking it to the guys giving you the prize, well, I'm sure Apple is very sorry. If you write to jobs@apple.com, he'll send you a gift certificate to be redeemed for a free iTunes song ($.99 processing fee applies.)
(And just for reference, contests with a house as a prize rarely actually give away a house. If you read the rules closely, you'll find that you can take cash instead. Nearly everybody takes the cash.)
They still have to pay royalities to the music labels.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that this prize package will be considered income to the winner's federal government. I'm an ignorent american, so I can't speak for other countires, but I'm fairly sure that if an american wins, Apple will file the proper paperwork with the IRS... pretty soon the $9900+iPods+concert trip ~= $15000 "free" prize package is going to cost the "winner" almost $5000 in income taxes.
If I won, I would have to forefit the prize because there is NO WAY I could afford to pay the taxes on it.
Now, if Apple were to be giving away a car, I could at least borrow money to pay the taxes, then sell the car to pay off the loan, and keep the balance for myself. There's not much I can do with $9900 of "free" music.
Bastards. I hope this leads to an iTunes boycott.
Admittedly, the iPod is a sweet little audio player with a clever store concept behind it.
/. is just free advertising for Steve & Co. We are not talking about new products or services here, folks. We are talking about shopping at SteveWorld to earn a few bonus points should we be so lucky to be counted as customer # 490000.
But putting this kind of story on
There are dozens of great (DRM-free) audio players out there. I cannot see why we should high-five every little stunt from Apple's marketing department on a site devoted to innovation and cool stuff.
talk about full of crap.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'd consider that more of a punishment if I had to sit through a Coldplay concert. Now if I could sell the tickets and passes that would be great. The rest of the prizes sound nice though.
mal/bloatware
OK, I'll bite...
iTunes doesn't do anything you don't ask it to. The store function can be completely turned off. As with any other player, you can use it without ever encountering DRM. And it certainly won't sell you p3ni$ p111z or erase your HD. How is it malware?
And as for the bloatware charge, iTunes doesn't have a lot of useless features; in fact, most users will complain about something that's missing (e.g. gapless playback, user-defined tags, etc.) before they'll complain of bloat. How is it bloatware?
I know, don't feed the trolls, but curiosity got the best of me.
Aww twenty dollars? I wanted a peanut. :(
Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!
Explain how.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Woohoo!
I'm on top of my game like I'm standin' on Xbox.