Variable Music Pricing: Not Just Affecting iTunes. Amazon and LaLa now Sporting New Prices Too

Well kids, it was fun while it lasted. Variable pricing has now spread to virtually every online music store. It was though yesterday Amazon would be immune from the strong arm of the music industry but unfortunately all major online music stores are charging more then a dollar for popular tracks.

Apple made headlines Tuesday by turning on tiered music pricing, with tracks at both $1.29 and 69¢ appearing, but the changes are industry-wide. Amazon, Lala, and Rhapsody are all selling tracks at these new prices (Wal-Mart is holding the line at $1.24), which seem to be an effort to both cash in on popular music and boost album sales. #

Also Slashdot examines the non existent “69 cent” song listings on iTunes.

Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered price structure in April, older tracks priced at $0.69 would outnumber the contemporary hits that are rising to $1.29. Today, several weeks later, iTunes made the transition. While the $1.29 tracks are immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks is proving to be an exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has placed on the iTunes main page, $0.69 downloads are a scarce commodity. MP3 Newswire tried to methodically drill down to unearth more of them only to find: 1) A download like Heart’s 34-year-old song Barracuda went up to $1.29, not down. 2) Obscure ’90s Brit pop and ’50s rockabilly artists — those most likely to benefit from a price drop — remained at $0.99. 3) Collected tracks from a cross-section of 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s artists all remained at $0.99. Finally, MP3 Newswire called up tracks in the public domain from an artist named Ada Jones who first recorded in 1893 on Edison cylinder technology. The price on all of the century-old, public-domain tracks remained at $0.99. (The same tracks are available for free on archive.org.) The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier. #

Is $1.29 too much for a song you want to listen to? Do you think that the music industry is lining themselves up for a user revolt or just finally charging the correct price for a song?