Ah, the Spice Girls. They sold 85 million records worldwide, brought ‘girl power’ into the mainstream and changed the sound of pop music forever. As a result of their success, the 5-piece weren’t afraid of indulging in a few brand endorsement deals. There was Cadbury, Chuppa-Chups and even Polaroid.
But the most notable one, was Pepsi.
Through Pepsi, the Spice Girls released a song, at the height of their career, that was unavailable for purchase. To listen to this incredible pop song, you needed to work hard.
In 1997, Pepsi launched its ‘generation next’ campaign in the UK. There were multiple tv spots, but notably, this campaign had Ginger, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Posh on Pepsi cans. These cans also had pink ring pull tabs on the roof of the soft-drink that you could pull off and collect.
If you collected twenty of these, sent them off, you would receive a free Spice Girls CD single, called ‘Step to Me’.
By sending these pink tabs across to Pepsi HQ, fans were also entered in the chances to see the Spice Girls live in Istanbul (their first-ever concert, which would also go on sale on DVD). After pumping out 92 million promotional packs of the Pepsi cans, 600,000 CDs ended up being redeemed with the campaign.
Thank God we have YouTube now, we can stream it in its glory without having to bother the postman. Check out the song below.
The only way you could have bought the CD in a brick-and-mortar store would be hitting up Tower Records, because the track was available on the Japanese version of their second album, SpiceWorld.
The song has yet to hit streaming services, which is a massive shame. Although, there have been a lot of Spice Girls fans on twitter who have drummed up enough noise to get a reply from Spotify themselves.
In a Tweet, Spotify replied to a fan requesting the song be added to the streaming service. They said: “It’d be awesome to have all of their stuff available! Rest assured, we do our best to make it so. But sometimes agreements are still ongoing, or can’t be reached with the content provider yet. Just stay tuned.”
Could we be getting ‘Step To Me’ on our smartphones? Hopefully any day now!
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