How-To Tuesday: How to enter the iTunes contest for free

The iTunes Music store from Apple is celebrating their 70% worldwide market share of legal downloads by having a contest to count down to the 100 millionth song with some great prizes like iPods, Powerbooks 10,000 free songs, etc. You're automatically entered when you buy a song from iTunes, but we're going to show you how to enter for free in this week's How-To.

The contest...we can all be winners

Apple wants folks to buy music from iTunes, so like many companies selling stuff, Apple is doing some promotions that include a contest. The iTunes contest is basically this: buy a song, and you're entered to win some cool stuff. As Apple gets closer to the 100 millionth song downloaded, some people might even buy more songs just to have better odds.
But all that said, companies by law need to offer up a way for anyone to enter a contest and still have an equal chance of winning without having to pay for something. We're not lawyers, but we're pretty sure if they don't it's consider gambling or something or other. This means you can enter the contest without buying a single song! At the time of this writing, Apple is up to about 97 million songs, so this contest might be over pretty soon.

All you need is love (and iTunes)
All you need is iTunes, which you can download for free
here from Apple for Mac or PC. If you have it already, make sure you have the latest version (4.6)— usually when you start iTunes and it'll tell you if there's an update. Then, simply click "Music Store" and click any album, song or whatever, and click the "Tell a Friend" button.

Instead of telling a friend, put in the following email address
itunes100@apple.com. Click send and you're entered.

It doesn't appear there is a limit to the number of times you can even enter!

Of course, there is even easier an easier way, click
this link. If you have iTunes, just click this link. It'll take you right to The Essential Lynyrd Skynyrd (we like Free Bird).

You can also make your own here with the iTunes link maker.

 
The Official rules

If you check out the site, it's pretty clear (sorta). A few pages of legal, in lightly colored text and a small font
(most people miss this stuff).

How To Enter. You will automatically be entered into the Promotion by: 1) downloading a song from iTunes (any Free
Download Single of the Week will be deemed an ineligible entry); or 2) a free alternative means of sending an email
to Apple at itunes100@apple.com via the iTunes "Tell a Friend" feature (a song download or Tell a Friend email will
be deemed an "Entry(ies"). The "Tell a Friend" feature can be easily accessed at iTunes by selecting a song, and
clicking the "Tell a Friend" link that is displayed for that song. One Entry will be automatically submitted for each
song downloaded or Tell a Friend email sent. The Promotion begins following the downloading of the 95,000,000th
iTunes song, and ends with the downloading of the 100 millionth Entry ("End Date"). Only Entries submitted in this
time period will be accepted.

You can check out the rest of the official rules
here.

The prizes! The precious...Yeeez

Prizes include:

50 special 20GB iPods—one to the purchaser of each 100,000th song downloaded between 95 million and 100 million
songs. In addition, the person who downloads the 100 millionth song will receive a 17-inch PowerBook, a 40GB iPod, a
gift certificate for 10,000 iTunes songs to create the ultimate music library for the iPod and the opportunity to
create a Celebrity Playlist to be published on the iTunes Music Store.

Good luck (and an observation about what is "real")

Good luck folks and enjoy! Winning the contest is cool, winning cause' you entered for free is even better! Make sure to pick a cool song.

Oh, one other thing worth noting. We're not quite sure how Apple counts downloads now—if the "Tell a Friend" way of entering the contest is the same as a download (which is seems it must as per legal stuff) it'll be hard to tell which was the "real" 100 millionth download. We're kinda curious how this will all work out, as we're pretty sure the winner is going to be from the "Tell a Friend" option and not from an actual download, just as we're also pretty sure some people are going to spend the next week just banging on "Tell a Friend" over and over.