Amazon, Walmart now follow tiered pricing


Late Tuesday Walmart and Amazon changed prices of their online music library, similar to Apple.

Tuesday morning Apple rolled out tiered pricing for its iTunes Store music catalog. The pricing roughly starts at $0.69 for older tracks, $0.99 for less popular, and $1.29 for high demand singles. For a while, Amazon retained its pricing. Later in the evening both Amazon.com and Walmart.com changed pricing to similar tiered structure. Walmart, however, is a few cents cheaper at $0.64, $0.79, and $1.24.

The change has long been a trophy for music labels, which wanted to cash in on hits while pushing older forgotten tracks. The labels gave up DRM and higher encoding rates to get its wishes. iTunes songs now should be available with no digital rights management and encoded at 256 kb/sec AAC.

It would seem as a part of the deal Apple wanted its main competitors to also abide by the same pricing, and Tuesday was the switch over date.