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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."
A use for all those free songs I had saved up from Mountain Dew bottles!
isn't one enough?
I'd gladly trade in the extra 9 for more songs.
Cynical side of me sees attempt to drum up more sales.
Realistic side... sees attempt to drum up more sales.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
Find a song, do the "tell a friend" feature and type in "itunes500@apple.com" as the friend to email. Each time you do it, it is an entry. -Nick
-nick
1. Gift them ...
2. Beowulf cluster
3.
4. Profit!?
Seriously though, you'd run out of people you felt close enough to to give them an iPod before you ran out.
And I think 10,500 songs counts as a lifetime supply.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
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
Yep. They overstocked by 10 units and they need to unload them stat.
Sincerely,
Jeve Stobs.
Just because something is free doesn't mean that it's valueless.
The RIAA will be handing out lawsuits for every 100,000th download on a p2p network, leading up to the public beheading of the person who download the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th song.
much like the bottle caps you could see the bottoms of before buying, this scheme has an obvious flaw.
Just buy 100,000 songs and hey, free ipod!
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 person who downloads the 500 millionth song wins 10 free iPods, a gold 10,000-song gift card...
...and gets to visit the iPod factory run by the mysterious Steve Wonka?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
We already know of a way to get 10,000 free songs. Your gimmicks ain't flyin'.
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.
The RIAA is sure to notice any company that gives away 10,500 songs...
;0]
Currently at 478 million downloads, the max amount of iPods would be about 230 (10 + 22million / 100K), but your point is valid.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
iTunes API comprehensive?a _Structure);
while (totaldownloads != 500000)
{
download_random_song(Mother_in_Law_Creditcard_Dat
totaldownloads++;
printf("Now I can havea beowulf cluster of iPods!\n");
}
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Oh sure, when Apple gives away 500 million songs it's called a promotion but when I do it the RIAA gets involved.
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.)
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.
I never win anything anyway. Hell, I can't even get MOD points and look how they give those away.
I can just see the personal ad now:
Go on a date with me, win an ipod.
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.
You're right, but 10,000 itunes songs has near zero value for me. I can't play them on my computer (no iTunes). I can't play them on my Rio Karma. I could give them to my girlfriend, but she works for the music industry and gets her music for free -- she can't remember ever buying a cd. I guess I could give them to my brother for xmas - 10 per year for the next 1000 years. Won't he be happy.
talk about full of crap.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'm an ignorent american
In fact, I'm so ignorent that I misspelled "ignorant".
I think it's time for a break...
If I win the free 10,000 songs that works out to roughly a $10,000 value. Do I have to pay taxes on it?
I'd consider that more of a punishment if I had to sit through a Coldplay concert. Now if I could sell the tickets and passes that would be great. The rest of the prizes sound nice though.
Also, beware of iTunes and using your credit card for it. I know a number of people who had their credit cards stolen through iTunes. I wouldn't take that risk and rather use any good P2P software.
Exactly. Why let some no name steal your credit card number when you can have the RIAA sue you AND infest your computer with a multitude of trojans and spyware!
It's all about return on investment people.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
mal/bloatware
OK, I'll bite...
iTunes doesn't do anything you don't ask it to. The store function can be completely turned off. As with any other player, you can use it without ever encountering DRM. And it certainly won't sell you p3ni$ 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.
No, it'd just be following the law. In the United States, giveaways like this have to be on a "no purchase necessary" basis so as not to run afoul of federal and state gambling laws.
I know a number of people who posted lies as Anonymous Cowards and had their testicles explode. Absolute, unimpeachable fact, my friend.
I wouldn't be playing so fast and loose with the boys if I were you, AC.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Really? A friend of mine told me that this guy once used iTunes and woke up in a bathtub of ice without one kidney.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
I could give them to my girlfriend, but she works for the music industry and gets her music for free
The true slashdotter in me doesn't know if I should hate you for sleeping with the enemy or just plain hate you for sleeping with a member of the opposite sex.
You would have made my life a lot easier if you were sleeping with a male indie-artist who got screwed over by a RIAA company.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. - but you still need itunes .
How To Enter. You will automatically be entered into the Promotion by: 1) downloading a song from iTunes (any free downloads will be deemed an ineligible entry); or 2) a free alternative means of sending an e-mail to Apple at itunes500@apple.com via the iTunes "Tell a Friend" feature (a song download or Tell a Friend e-mail will be deemed an "Entry(ies)"). The "Tell a Friend" feature can be easily accessed at iTunes by selecting a song, and clicking the "Tell a Friend" link that is displayed for that song. One Entry will be automatically submitted for each song downloaded or Tell a Friend e-mail sent. The Promotion begins following the downloading of the 480,000,000th iTunes song, and ends with the downloading of the 500 millionth Entry ("End Date"). Only Entries submitted in this time period will be accepted.
Last year the counter was so far behind that people were fooled into buying songs long after the possibility to win was actually there. They had contacted the winner, given him his prize, and gotten pictures of him w/ it days before their webpage counter hit its target.
Anytime someone mentions "my girlfriend" in an online setting I always assume chick on chick. I think I have a problem ;-)
It sounds like you want http://www.allofmp3.com/. They're just like iTunes except:
1) They charge by the amount transferred
2) They're ten times cheaper
3) They let you choose what kind of encoding you want
4) They're technically legal (thanks to Russia's "mandatory licensing" laws)
5) If you use it you piss of the RIAA.
If you run Windows they even have a client that's not unlike iTunes. Other OSes will need to use their web interface.
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
I wrote a simple Perl program that extrapolates when each of the upcoming 100,000 songs will be purchased. It's probably quite wrong, but it was fun to write. I posted the code and the results in my blog. To sum up, my program predicts number 500 million will be at Fri Jul 15 05:09:29 2005 CDT (US/Central time)
Second place gets 8 first row Coldplay tickets with back-stage passes.
4. Eligibility. In order to be eligible, entrants must be 13 years of age or older, and a legal resident of one of the 50 United States, including Washington, D.C., Austria, Belgium, Canada (excluding the Province of Quebec), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland or the United Kingdom.
Wow, didn't know Austria, Belgium, Canada etc. were included in the 50 United States!
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
On the front page of http://www.apple.com/ Apple.com