Pepsi hires RIAA-sued teens for ad

Televisual stardom of a sort awaits for a few lucky teens collared by the RIAA for illegally downloading music from the internet – 20 or so of the youngsters will be featuring in an advert for Pepsi, boasting about how they'll still be downloading tunes for free.

Is the fizzy-drink purveyor encouraging criminal activity among the young? No. The ad will be aired to promote the Pepsi-iTunes tie-up, which will see the partners giving away 100 million free downloads.

The RIAA, which has been waging a lawsuit-happy war on P2P network users, has said that it believes the ad is a sign of how the downloading environment has changed recently, to have an emphasis on legal downloading.

Apart from plugging paid downloading, the ad may benefit the RIAA in other ways. One of the young lawbreakers will be using the fee from the promotion to pay off her settlement with the RIAA.

While Pepsi is hoping that the ad will tap into the download-hungry mood of the yoof, its tactics have to be admired. The ad, to be shown during the Super Bowl this week, manages to have a foot in both camps of the downloading debate.

Britney's beverage of choice could well garner some reflected cool from the P2P outlaws. It is paying out what is, most probably, not an insubstantial amount of money to 'criminals', all the while making sure it's got its feet firmly placed on the right side of the law – and the music fraternity.

It looks like Pepsi is onto a winner, according to findings from Forrester Research. The analyst group believes that downloading teens are costing the US music industry around $700m a year and as a result, the CD as a music format will be dead in five years.