A giant US burp-water manufacturer - Pepsi - has conned a schoolgirl victim of the RIAA’s sue ‘em all anti-file sharing campaign into appearing in its ad promoting an RIAA-backed online music store.

And the mainstream media don’t seem to think there’s too much wrong with that.

The girl, Annie Leith, (or her parents) had to pay the Big Five record labels three big ones - $3000 - to avoid being dragged into court where they stood a better-than-even chance of having to pay the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, a ‘trade’ organ owned by the labels and which acts as their enforcer) far more.

Leith says she’s going to use “use some of her undisclosed ad fee to help pay for the settlement”. Fair enough. But what isn’t fair is Pepsi using her as a mark in the first place.

The record labels are components of the Hollywood Green Machine and they’ve been screaming blue murder about file sharing. Now they use it promote an online ‘music store’ which in and of itself is a travesty and which not at all coincidentally, promotes and sells record label ‘product’.

This morning, we trawled Google expecting to see a stack of headlines condemning Pepsi and the music industry. But - there was nary a one. Instead, there were a number of clips from the USA TODAY story more or less repeating it word-for-word.

And the Mac Observer actually supports the tasteless Pepsi attempt to cash in on someone’s misfortune.

“This is a very smart spot for Pepsi,” it says here. “Not only is the company plugging its iTunes promotion while reminding viewers that downloading music for free is illegal, but they’re hitting hard at their target demographic by putting faces to the names of those sued by the RIAA.”

But this isn’t all she wrote.

DownhillBattle is one of the few online sites which does more than just mouth off. And it has something lined up for Pepsi.

As they write here on the Pepsi /iTunes farce, “We certainly don’t blame the kids for taking the money (we would), but the whole thing is a filthy cycle of putting people in debt and then forcing them to shill to get out of it. Sure, Pepsi didn’t do the suing, but their promotion depends on the lawsuits being in place.”

Starting February 1, Apple and Pepsi-Cola North America are ‘giving away’ codes randomly seeded in 20 ounce and 1 liter bottles of various Pepsi drinks. The codes will be ‘redeemable’ for a free song from the iTunes Music Store.

“Related to this, we’re cooking up a project related to the bottlecap promotion, so stay tuned,” says DHB

We will …

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2004 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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