A big story today is that Amazon is teaming up with Pepsi to give away 5 BILLION songs through the AmazonMP3 service starting in February 2008. 5 billion is a huge number, that’s great. The devil is in the details though as you’ll need to collect FIVE Pepsi caps for each song you want to download – is this bottle cap inflation? What happened to the 1-for-1 deal that iTunes has offered a couple of times through Pepsi?

In the 2004 iTunes/Pepsi promotion, only 5 million of the 100 million tracks offered were downloaded (that’s 5%) – and that was on a simple 1 bottle cap for 1 song deal. If people have to collect 5 for each song, expect this percentage to go way down. Not only do I not drink nearly enough Pepsi (or any Pepsi for that matter – I’m a Coke guy), there is no chance I hang on to 5 of those scuzzy bottle tops at a time. Imagine if you want just 5 tracks, that’s 25 bottle caps sitting on your desk, that’s a lot of space.

Just as Molson got in trouble earlier in the week for basically promoting binge drinking of beer – Pepsi is now promoting binge drinking of soda. You want that entire new Killers CD? That’ll be 85 bottle caps (17 tracks times 5 caps a song). For all the talk of the obesity problem in this country and what a large part sugar-rich soda plays, encouraging kids to drink 85 of them to get one CD seems like a truly awful idea.

Here’s an idea Pepsi and Amazon: why not only put the download codes under the caps of your sugar-free beverages. If you want to be greedy, at least try to do some good as well.