Apple iTunes has sold more than 1 billion songs to date. Now they are inviting people to spread the news and get paid. It works much like usual affiliate programs.

You place a link from your blog, website, or email to songs, albums, artists, audiobooks, popular public radio programs or even podcasts. Apple will let you earn 5% commission on all qualifying revenue generated by your links to iTunes.

The Apple iTunes affiliate program is managed by LinkShare affilite network, now owned by Rakuten.

Anyone can join the affiliate program, although Apple has the right to refuse any site that doesn’t comply with the Terms and Conditions. Non U.S. web publishers and marketers could join as long as their site target the U.S. customers.

One of the most cool features available to affiliates is iTunes Music Store RSS Feed Generator. It allows affiliates to customize the feeds and display them on their site with RSS parsers. See and try yourself a demo of iTunes feed generator here.

The downside: Affiliates only get paid if their link is the last link to iTunes that the customer uses during a “session” where a sale of a product or a service to customer occurs. Quoted from Apple’s Affiliate Programs Terms and Conditions; a session is either:

1. a period of 24 hours from the time of a Customer’s initial contact with iTunes via a link from the Affiliate’s site or the Engagement expires or is terminated or
2. if a Customer links to iTunes from more than one affiliate site within a 24-hour period, then the period of time beginning from a Customer’s initial contact with iTunes via a link from the Affiliate’s site and terminating when the Customer either returns to iTunes via a link from a site other than Affiliate’s site or the Engagement expires or is terminated.

Twenty four hours? Well, I never promote any music so probably that should be acceptable? At least Paul Colligan also thinks it is rather restrictive.

Link: iTunes Affiliates.
Related: Podcast Monetization.

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