--Pepsi I-Tunes Hassle--

I recently redeemed my free I-tunes, what a hassle. When I heard Pepsi was giving away free music, I was intrigued. I knew it would be easy to track down a few of the winner bottle caps, just a matter of going out and doing it. I even had a infallable system to choose only bottles that were winners. What I didn't know, however, was that it would be a real problem getting the freebies from Apple. It was like when you were a kid and your parents told you that the neighbors were giving out free candy, but you had to go and pick it all up, walking all across town dressed like a scarecrow. There's always a catch.

The first step in retreiving your free music is downloading and installing the special I-Tunes software. This took me approximately 8 minutes to get the software completely downloaded and installed, no big deal right? You got some extra crap on your computer but you're well on your way to getting that free prize!

Once everything is installed you can proceed to downloading right.... WRONG. Before you can go on your musical shopping spree you first must create an I-Tunes username/password and provide Apple with your private information, name, phone #, address, and your email. I don't know about you, but I tend to be pretty stingy with my private info. Obviously all the information I entered was going to be to try and sell me more crap I don't need and to fill my inbox with garbage. I reclutantly entered my info, faking my phone number, of course, and was all set to reap my reward.

Yet another snag, I-Tunes may or may not have your favorite music. I had two free songs, the first I chose was Reptillia by The Strokes, a popular song, so it was no problem to find it and download the song using their Search features. My second choice, Lovesong by 311 was nowhere to be found. Lovesong is a cover of a Cure song from the 80's and is featured on the 50 First Dates soundtrack. After a few minutes of digging I gave up.

All in all it was a very painful experience trying to retreive my free songs from Pepsi, and it took upwards of 25 minutes before I was able to get the software instealled, find the son I wanted and get it downloaded. One thing to keep in mind. The I-tunes are in M4P format. Good luck trying to get it to work with anything but the I-Tunes software. What a hassle, I will never use I-tunes again.