No Purchase Necessary

So Apple’s doing a big contest to celebrate 100 million songs downloaded on iTunes. They’re giving away 49 20 GB iPods and a grand prize of a 40 GB iPod, 17 inch Powerbook and 10,000 free songs. Not too shabby.

The prizes go to whoever purchases a 100,000th song between 95 and 100 million. So you download song number 95,100,000 and you win an iPod. Not too shabby.

Yet the official rules clearly state “no purchase necessary.” Apparently you can also be entered by using the “Tell a Friend” feature to e-mail a track suggestion to a friend. Yet Apple fails to explain how you can win with this method considering winning involves being the purchaser of a 100,000th song. So either you simply can’t win with the free option (but you can enter!), or Apple’s going to inflate their download count with free entries.

Confused? Me too.

6 thoughts on “No Purchase Necessary”

  1. I’ve already said this, but I’ll say it again: Downloading a free song of the week requires no purchase, but is still a download.

    (On or after July 6th that link won’t point to a free song because the free songs change. Every week. Thus “Free song of the Week“.)

  2. OK, here it is. From the “How to Win” section:

    One 20GB iPod will be awarded for each Entry sent immediately following the 99,999th song downloaded

    The key there is that the winner doesn’t win by downloading a certain “numbered” song. The winner wins by entering immediately following a certain number. The example they give is for the intermediate prizes, but the big prize works the same way. So winners don’t have to download. They just have to enter immediately after the download number that comes directly before the big number.

    There you have it. Entering via email and downloading are the same thing, but we don’t count the actual email entries in our download numbers.

  3. Oh, and it won’t really be false claiming that we’ve done 100 million songs even if the winning entry is an email since, according to the current number posed on the site, we do about 2.6 downloads every second. So by the time we announce that we’ve done 100 million downloads (we’ll guess maybe 30 minutes after the big prize has actually been won), we will have blown past that number by quite a ways.

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