McDonald's 1 Billion Song Promotion... A Go?

Martin Bandier, Chairman and CEO of EMI Music Publishing, spoke at EMI's Interim Results 2003 Conference today.

Starting at 38 minutes into the webcast, Mr. Bandier speaks of EMI's performance over this past year, and goes on to discuss the growth of legal music download services such as Apple's iTunes. On future performance, he notes:

"... but there is real potential for the future especially when PepsiCola makes a commitment to giveaway up to 100 million downloads and Mcdonald's commits to 1 billion in download giveaways as part of a promotional campaign."

The New York Post first reported that McDonald's was close to announcing a 1 billion iTunes song giveaway. While McDonald's had no deal to announce at the time, we subsequently received confirmation that the deal was in the works.

While it is possible the comments may simply be reflective of the circulating rumors, it seems likely that EMI's CEO would be privy to such knowledge and that he would be unlikely to make comments at a financial conference based on unfounded rumors.