Come Super Bowl Sunday, Amazon.com will get a leg up in the digital music race it’s running against Apple Inc.’s iTunes Store. And not just any leg: Justin Timberlake’s leg.

The boy band heartthrob turned Grammy-winning R&B singer will seem in a spot for Pepsi, kicking off a yearlong $1 billion giveaway of MP3s, CDs, videos, consumer electronics and other items on Amazon.

Back in 2004, PepsiCo Inc. and Apple forged a similar partnership, which started with an iTunes Super Bowl commercial promoting legal music downloads, to the tune of Green Day’s version of “I Fought the Law.” The companies gave away 100 million free iTunes downloads that, with rising iPod sales, helped push Apple to the forefront of the digital music industry.

Working with Amazon that year is big deal for Pepsi, which said it will spend more on its “Pepsi Stuff” advertising campaign than on any past marketing effort.

For Amazon.com Inc., the arrangement could

In September 2007, Amazon launched a digital music store and committed to sell only MP3-format tunes, which can be copied to multiple computers, burned onto an unlimited number of CDs and played on most portable devices, including Apple’s iPod and Microsoft Corp.’s Zune.

Thousands of independent music labels signed deals with Amazon, but EMI Music Group PLC, which already offered songs without digital rights management coding on iTunes, was the only major label to agree to DRM-free sales on Amazon.

But as a rise in sales of digital tracks in 2007 folded to offset the overall decline in album sales, the three big labels have rapidly begun retooling their digital strategies. When Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG signed on to sell DRM-free songs, they chose to do so on Amazon and not iTunes, where more than 70 percent of digital music…

Original post by Top Tech News