A Downhill Battle project
Turning useless soda caps into forces for good.
With the Tune Recycler, you can send us your unwanted iTunes bottlecap codes and we'll use them to support independent music. Easy for you, and good for musicians.
Pepsi is giving away 100 million iTunes songs under Pepsi bottlecaps. For some people, winning an "iTune" when they open their Pepsi might be exhilarating. But if you aren't one of those excitable few, we understand — you didn't exactly win the lottery. Most people who drink Pepsi don't use iTunes, so winning a single song means you won a chance to spend 20 minutes downloading, installing, and signing up for a music service that will cost a lot more than your Pepsi habit. USA Today reported that Pepsi expects only 10–20% of all caps to be redeemed. That means 80–90 million of them will end up in the trash.
A winning Pepsi cap isn't just a song, it's a chance to send Pepsi's 99 cents somewhere good. When a cap is redeemed, Pepsi pays Apple 99 cents for the song, and Apple passes along 65 cents to a record label. Unfortunately, most of the music on iTunes is put out by one of the 5 major record labels, and their business practices are highly suspect. When you buy an iTunes song from a major label, there's a good chance the artist won't see a penny, because they're still recouping. If the artist does get a cut, it's only about 10 cents from the 99 cents you paid. But we can do better!
When you submit a winning Pepsi code to the Tune Recycler, we'll redeem it for music from honest, independent labels. There are a few great independent labels in the iTunes store that give their musicians up to 40–50 cents, right from the first sale. When you use the Tune Recycler, you know that no money is going to support price fixing, payola, or lawsuits against families with children — and most importantly, the money goes to a musician. That way, you don't have to sign up with iTunes to get one song, but you can still put that cap to use.
Every week or so, we'll be choosing a few independent artists and a particular album of theirs which we will repeatedly purchase using the donated codes. If we buy enough copies of a single album, we might even be able to move it up the iTunes charts — it's not too hard these days. All the artists will be from independent labels with reputations for treating artists fairly.
A rock band on Matador Records, a great New York indie label. According to the PGMG website, they recently had a bunch of equipment stolen, so we're psyched to help them get back on their feet by buying The New Romance.
Check out some mp3s:
Jean Grae is a rapper on Babygrande Records. Read this awesome article / editorial by Jean about sexism and uniformity in the music industry. She's got the skills to back it up. We'll be buying her album The Bootleg of the Bootleg EP (and maybe you should too!).
Menomena is a critically acclaimed rock band that isn't even signed to a label. They sell their album on iTunes via CD Baby, which is a service that probably gives artists a bigger cut of iTunes sales than anyone else (they only take 9 cents per song). You can listen to the full Menomena album I Am the Fun Blame Monster! on the . You can also buy the album at OEbase.
Downhill Battle is not a big fan of the iTunes Music Store, as you may know if you've seen our web page, iTunes iSbogus. Our biggest problem with the store is that it helps perpetuate the major record labels' domination of the music business, which is bad for musicians, fans, and music. The internet has enormous potential to cut out the middleman and get more money to artists. iTunes fails to live up to that potential.
Another major problem with the iTunes store is that it doesn't include music from very many independent record labels and it doesn't allow self-published musicians to sell their music through the store (though there are hopeful signs that Apple is responding to this criticism by opening things up a little more). On the positive side, Apple claims not to accept pay-for-placement in the store, which is a small step in the right direction towards leveling the playing field for independent music.
Ultimately, our opposition to iTunes on the whole doesn't mean that we won't take an opportunity when we see one. This Pepsi promotion is a chance to get some real dollars into the hands of great independent artists and record labels. Supporting independent music is what we're all about.
Pepsi has begun airing an ad for this promotion that features 16 of the children who were sued by the major record labels for filesharing. It's a perfect cycle: now that these kids and their families have been put in debt by the major labels, they have to sell themselves in a soda commercial to make back some of what they owe. But the ad isn't just exploitative, it's also wildly inaccurate. A girl in the ad says, "I'm one of the kids who was prosecuted for downloading music free off of the internet." And throughout the commercial, the words "busted", "charged", "incriminated", and "accused" flash across the screen (you can watch the ad here). Now, while "busted" and "accused" might be ambiguous enough to apply to these lawsuits, no one was "prosecuted" or "charged" with any crime. Actually, none of the filesharing lawsuits has even gone to court, because the cost of mounting a defense against the major record labels is far too expensive for an individual or family. Furthermore, none of these kids or anyone else was sued for "downloading music"; all the suits have been for uploading, which can be easily turned off in the settings of any filesharing program (here's how according to Charter Communications). In fact, there haven't been any court rulings in the US that prohibit downloading music and the Canadian government has explicitly ruled that downloading is legal.
Implying criminality is serious business. As reported on p2pnet.net, Josh Wattles, a lawyer and the former acting general counsel of Paramount Pictures, has said of the Pepsi ad "Falsely attributing criminal conduct to someone is a slam-dunk libel in just about every state...There's no calculus of relative harm to justify this kind of abusive, untruthful and cynical behavior towards minors no matter how complicit their misguided parents may have been in this deception."
The ad's final insult is that the background music is a Green Day cover of "I fought the law (and the law won)". Now, we have never accused a band of selling out before, it's counter-productive and puritanical. With the extent of major label domination in the music business, artists often have to compromise, and it's usually not their fault. But when Green Day, a punk band, covers a song about "fighting the law" for a soda commercial that cashes in on kids getting screwed by record companies, that is some serious sell-out bullshit.
For more, check out the videos below.
Know someone who drinks Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, or Sierra Mist? Let them know about the recycler.