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College kids when they start working will be dealt the “reality check” card with their first employer. A bit like laws governing minors today. The law is the law, like it or not, one has to obey or face the consequences.

Giving away a download is *not* free to Apple. They have to pay the record companies their share (estimated to be around $0.70 a download). Presumably with this deal, the record companies are giving the tracks at a discounted/free rate (like the free CD samplers you get from records stores).

And hey! If college kids download all this DRMed music, then buy a Zune, (according to rumours) Microsoft will have to buy out all these tracks! Double bonus to Apple!

Marshall, you’ve GOT to be kidding me - the iTunes Music Store has an inferior user experience to P2P networks? Cost-wise P2P wins over the IMS no doubt (but, uh, it’s illegal), but you cannot say that the user experience is better. The iTunes Music Store is a gorgeous interface to searching, browsing, and previewing music, one that the P2P interfaces cannot come even close to.

Put it this way: the iTunes Music Store user experience is like shopping at Tiffany’s, with carefully thought-out display, lighting, and personal assistants to help you find exactly what you want. P2P networks “user experience” are like breaking into Tiffany’s on a Tuesday night with a flashlight, shoving a necklace you saw someone wearing the other day in your pockets, and getting out of there before the police show up

Why would apple give away a free song every week? To popularize the given artist of course!

Why would Apple give away 25 free songs every week? To popularize 25 given artists of course!

Secondly, adding an author to the mix adds a potential for bias, which probably isn’t a good idea. Declaring an author would be like saying “John Smith thinks you should like this song.” It puts the consumer and the producer on different heirarchical levels, which in the “friendly” trend of web 2.0 would not be model behavior.

Maybe I’m just impatient, but I also agree strongly with what rfruit said above.

I know blog posts are prone to hyperbole given their brevity and journalistic style, but come on dude. Apple is setting the songs for this promotion to a specific list for marketing reasons, not due to some limitation of the iTunes Music Store. Look at how the Pepsi/Gap iTunes promotions worked.

Comparing the “user experience” of a P2P network to iTunes is ludicrous. One is legal, the other is not. One is incredibly simple to search, find, and purchase a whole album with guaranteed quality, the other requires a painfully long period of searching, downloading, verifying, etc.

As you mentioned the retail price of these songs a la carte is valued at close to $250M. In a perfect world you would be able to choose your 25 songs but lets think for a reason why they may have decided to do a bundle like this.

They may have negotiated special deals with the labels and both sides are chipping in and not taking the full percent of their take home on this. As a result label A said include songs from this band…and this band etc. We want to get that out there and see if it helps convert to full album sales etc.

I see this as a positive not a negative promo. I am sure students that are taking advantage of this promo are saying wow thats cool I get $25 worth of music for free.

When the chef brings you over desert for free do you complain and say I don’t like what you brought over can I have something else

Sure, you can find most of the stuff on iTunes for free on P2P if you decide to invest some time. You’ll end up with a few broken Mp3s and a few good ones. You could also decide that your time isn’t worth as much and simply click once to download the songs from iTunes. Some people will do the former, some will do the latter. However, giving songs away for free in order to get those who will pirate songs to download from iTunes must be the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Apple isn’t some web2.0 company which lives on investments. Apple lives on selling things to customers which want to buy these things.

In a week she has bought more than 3 albums.

Probably Apple trusts people to fall in love with their software once anyone touches it.
Compare to Sony’s musicstore promotions. I’ve been seeing free codes all over the web. I don’t think many people got hooked on.

The real news here is that a connection is being drawn between iTunes and Facebook, two applications entrenched with students today. Smart business move? The stock will reflect it.

Apple’s job is to reach a prime demographic during a critical purchase period. So free music at Facebook, during the “back to school” purchase period, is simple good marketing. Or “Marketing 1.0″ as it is sometimes called.

And of course, how about a new iPod to go with that free music? Because this promotion is not about iTunes, it’s not about all that jibberjabber you mentioned, it’s about iPods! Selling more iPods! Duhh…