I found out today that REM’s new album will be released on April 1. It can be pre-ordered on iTunes right now, but I’ve become a fan of the DRM free tracks sold on Amazon. Upon searching for the new album there I was surprised to see a new way to get tracks.

Amazon is partnering with Pepsi. The program isn’t all that new, they soda companies have been offering “drink cola, get free stuff” promotions for years, even before the interwebs took off. With this program, you drink cola, go to PepsiStuff.com, register your points from the bottle cap and once you have enough points, you get to download mp3 files from Amazon.

The PepsiStuff.com site is integrated right into Amazon. They do a pretty good job of warning in-line that the user is not yet registered and it works well. This approach is much better than allowing the user to jump off to the sister site only to find that they need to go through additional hurdles. From Amazon’s perspective, they shouldn’t care how you buy, just that you do buy, so they are very smart using this approach. The user is warned “hey, you can’t use Pepsi points yet, so why no just purchase right here?”.