So do you remember that article we linked to last week that claimed that Pepsi would be advertising an iTunes tie-in during the Super Bowl again this February? Well, apparently the resurrection of the 100 million-song giveaway isn't actually a secret, since faithful viewer Todd McCurdy was at the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions trade show last month, and Pepsi was running commercials on the screens in its booth showing the Pepsi and Apple logos side-by-side between the phrases "It's Back" and "It's Bigger." So apparently this time around they're going to have, say, 200 million winning yellow bottle caps, which might lead to a mammoth 10 million song downloads if Pepsi lames out on the bottle deliveries again.

But who cares, really, when soon you'll be able to score free tunes not only by chugging fizzy brown sugar water, but also by eating a healthy and delicious selection of peaches, plums, and nectarines? Faithful viewer Nina Tovish tipped us off to a Sacramento Bee article about Apple's "first foray into produce": the California Tree Fruit Agreement (that's a group?) is signing up with Apple to offer a "novel cross-marketing promotion" whereby produce shoppers loading up on California fruits-- tree fruits, natch, as per the "Agreement"-- might then download free songs as a happy little bonus. Groove while you munch, that sort of thing.

The hope, apparently, is that such a promotion will turn tune-seeking "adolescents begging parents to buy fruit" into an all-too-common sight in supermarket produce aisles. While we're a little skeptical of that ever happening, we have to admit that we're about a zillion times more likely to buy a nice bag of plums than a 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi, so we're curious to hear just how this promotion's going to work. As of yet, the CTFA hasn't decided how many songs it'll give away, or just how much fruit people will need to buy before they get some free iTMS action. In fact, hardly anything about this promo seems to have been nailed down yet, but there's plenty of time, since the whole campaign obviously won't kick off until peach/plum/nectarine season starts early next summer.

But they're probably going to need that much time to figure out the logistics of this whole spiel. Think about it; nectarines don't have bottle caps. So what are they going to do, put download codes right on the fruit on peel-off stickers? Because you just know that entire crops would be picked clean of stickers by non-fruit-buying spoilsports within seconds of the fruit getting onto store shelves-- "no purchase necessary," indeed. And what's this "size of purchase to qualify" thing? If we buy five peaches, we get one song? What, are all these stores supposed to dole out the download codes at checkout time? Not likely, fella. Sounds like someone's got some thinking to do.

At the end of the day, though, these are just details; someone'll get everything straightened out over the next six months, we're sure. We're just happy we can look forward to some free downloads come peach season, whatever the mechanism for doling out the goodies turns out to be. And if they find a way to get the download codes inside the fruit and onto the pits themselves, we'll be really impressed.