Online community Radiotakeover will next week launch an Apple iPod giveaway promotion. Users of the independent-focused hard rock site will have the chance to win one of 10 branded iPods over the next two months. Any visitor to the site who spends $50 or more in Radiotakeover’s store in a 48-hour period will be eligible for the contest.
Radiotakeover, which offers free streams of mostly emo and hardcore music, boasts more than 10,000 active listeners (the number of users who have listened to one of the site’s three channels in the last 30 days).
Launched by Web entrepreneur Shawn Van Der Poel in 1998, Radiotakeover.com has grown into a full-fledged artist-promotion company that works in conjunction with Van Der Poel’s touring and marketing firms.
The iPod promotion will herald the start of Radiotakeover’s MP3 back-up library. Any user who purchases a CD from the site will have instant access to every song on the album for unlimited downloads. Van Der Poel says each song will be encoded with a tag that will contain the purchaser’s name and email address.
“Some labels were very upset with us,” Van Der Poel says of the library, “but when it comes down to it, that’s [an individual’s] right. They have the ability to make a digital back-up of the music. We had labels call us and complain, but nobody pulled out of our store.”
Each iPod will be branded with a Radiotakeover logo and come pre-loaded with every album that a user purchased via the Radiotakeover store. Van Der Poel says the promotion’s roots date back to a nasty email he sent to Apple/Pixar CEO Steve Jobs.
“Our company is 95% Apple, and a year and a half ago we bought all this equipment,” he said. “Apple messed up our order, and we probably had $100,000 worth of high-end servers. I sent an email to every variation of Steve Jobs’ name, and one of them got through to him. He sent the email to one of his assistants to take care of it, and every since then I’ve had this great communication with Apple.”
Van Der Poel also manages Face the Music touring, which books acts such as Atreyu, Coheed and Cambria, In Flames, Killswitch Engage and Thursday.
In addition to free radio streams, Radiotakeover offers marketing and video production services to independent labels.
