It all starts February 1 when consumers purchasing specially marked Pepsi products can collect points redeemable for music at Amazon MP3. Pepsi will send 4 billion marked packages to market, and each song in the contest can be had for accumulating five points. Contestants “bank” their points on PepsiStuff.com and then trade them in for tunes at Amazon MP3.

Scheduled to kick off only three days before Super Bowl XLII, the Pepsi Stuff promotion marks a turning point in the online music business. Four years ago Apple aligned itself with the soft drink manufacturer, as iTunes and Pepsi teamed up to give away 100 million songs.

But now Amazon MP3 and its non-DRM policy is the latest name in the music download race, although iTunes still commands more than 80 percent of the market. Even though the major labels praised Steve Jobs when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store in 2003, the labels slowly discovered that they had gone into business with, well, Steve Jobs, and quickly took a disliking to Jobs’ habit of having things his way.

Like pricing and DRM. It was only a year ago when Jobs posted an essay on Apple.com decrying the use of digital rights management technology. It was only a few weeks later when EMI announced it would sell non-protected tracks on iTunes.

And EMI is still the only major label to sell unprotected songs on iTunes even though all four majors, including EMI, permit Amazon MP3 to sell DRM-less MP3 tracks. That the majors granted Amazon to sell unprotected music while insisting that Apple keep using its proprietary DRM for iTunes selections is probably one of the bigger signs that the recording industry wants Amazon MP3 to succeed, if only because Amazon might be the only online service capable of giving iTunes a run for its download money.

“We are excited to team up with Pepsi and reward millions of Pepsi Stuff participants with high-quality DRM-free music downloads from major and independent labels,” said Bill Carr, Amazon VP for digital music and movies.