You saw me go on about Pepsi's new 'Roman gladiator' one. Now, assuming you watch, you may see another of Pepsi's commercials, this one promoting a Pepsi give-away. You'll see 16 fresh-faced kids, all ones that the RIAA had targeted for lawsuit (and pretty much all of which settled out of court). They will be shown in with a dark and gritty feel, with overlays that say "Accused", "Prosecuted" and "Busted", and one particularly cute girl (14 years old) will tell you they they were all busted for illegal music downloading and that "we're still going to download music free off the Internet - and there's nothing you can do about it!"
The reason is because the new Pepsi give-away is music. You look under the cap and you may receive one free song download from iTunes. Total give-away is 100 million songs. Let's dig on this for a second. Each of those songs was licensed from the RIAA, and they'll receive $0.75 per song...that's a cool $75 million in pure profit for the RIAA. iTunes songs are in .AAC format (basically, the sound component of MPEG-4), which means you either play it on the Apple software or your iPod...so iPod sales will increase. Add to that the fact that iTunes download sales is at about 30 million...and now will be 130 million. Those people that got one song are likely to go ahead and start paying for more...and Apple's sales go through the roof. Gee, can't IMAGINE why they were all happy to go into this with Pepsi.
So what have we got here? We've got an exploitive bit of video, we've got a massive collusion of corporate manipulation, and we've got off-handedly bad messages. Fuckin' corporations. I'm glad I don't watch TV, I'm glad I don't use Apple stuff, and I'm glad I drink Coke.
I hate it here.
Rant source comes from this article...thanks to
vesparider for the link!