Oops, this is the part where our occasional dips into the unfamiliar waters of Lake Optimism wind up leaving us afflicted with some sort of malignant fungal infection, metaphorically speaking. Remember yesterday's extended rant about how BBC NEWS (and about a bazillion other news outlets, it turns out-- we even just saw it crawling the bottom of the screen on TechTV) falsely reported that Apple's 50 million songs sold at the iTunes Music Store was waaaaaay short of the company's 100 million song goal? Our two points were that the 50 million songs didn't include free downloads from the Pepsi promo (while the 100 million song goal does) and that the "deadline" for the 100 million song target is still six weeks away. Assuming zero growth and with Apple selling 2.5 million songs per week, that would put the sold total at about 65 million, meaning that Apple would hit its numbers if just 35 million songs were redeemed from the Pepsi campaign. Since there are 100 million winning Pepsi caps floating around out there, a redemption rate of roughly 1 in 3 isn't too much to hope for, right?

Except that, apparently, it is. The Wall Street Journal now reports that no less an insider than Big Steve himself has admitted that Apple "expects to fall short" of the magic one-and-eight-zeros-and-maybe-a-couple-of-commas. Says Steve, "We're not going to make that number. At the rate we're at right now, we'll probably have sold 70 to 75 million songs" by the April 28th deadline. So the media was right in the sense that Apple most likely will miss its goal, although not by quite as much as the 50% margin that the doomsayer reports had implied.

Now, here's the thing: we can't see any reason why Apple would expect a slowdown in actual song purchases, since the songs-per-week rate has increased pretty solidly over the past several months (half a million in September, 1.5 million in December, and now 2.5 million in March). With six weeks to go until April 28th, the company ought to have sold at least 65 million songs by then. And that means that if Steve is projecting a "70 million to 75 million" total once the Pepsi song redemptions are counted, that means that Pepsi's megahuge 100 million song giveaway is actually only expected to generate (and this is the part where you just marvel at our astounding mastery of arithmetic, here) 5 to 10 million free song downloads. In other words, forget about our pie-in-the-sky 1-in-3 redemption ratio; Steve seems to think it's going to be more like 1 in 10, or maybe even 1 in 20.

Steve's official and diplomatic evaluation of the skimpy number of redemptions is that "they aren't what we thought they might be" and he blames the lousy ratio in part on Pepsi getting the caps out so late. (Related note: with only two weeks left in the promotion, we still haven't spotted a single yellow-capped Sierra Mist bottle out here in the Boston area.) Presumably Pepsi, having already disclosed the odds of winning, is required to ship all 300 million eligible bottles before the contest ends in two weeks; what this would mean, of course, is that there are (or will be) a lot of winning yellow caps still sitting on the shelves out there, so warm up your tiltin' hand, break open the piggy bank, and prepare to get all sugared up. Free music always sounds better when you're hovering on the edge of hyperglycemic shock.

And aside from the whole lateness issue, there's also the other possibility: that 19 out of 20 winners may simply be tossing their free songs in the trash. We've heard from several viewers who have been scoring their ten free songs a day without paying a penny on fizzy beverages; they're just hanging around outside of convenience stores and retrieving yellow caps from the trash cans. One viewer who wishes to remain anonymous (gee, we wonder why?) admits to swiping bags of garbage from the Dumpster behind a local Pepsi-selling deli in the middle of the night, tossing them in the trunk of his car, and then combing through the contents later in his garage. Classy? Well, no. But he claims to be close to hitting the promo's 200-song limit after only five nights, and all without spending a dime. And that, friends, will score him all sorts of points with the ladies. ("Sure, he may smell like garbage and be carrying the plague, but what a music collection! And just look at all that disposable income he has that the other boys would have blown on soda!")

So whether it be Dumpster-diving or blowing the rent on Pepsi products, do what you need to, people; a 1-in-20 redemption rate is just pathetic. And we don't want Apple reporting an embarrassing outcome on April 28th, do we?