Music labels are looking to dilute Apple’s influence on the music download market by causing the media giant to charge more for songs in its music store than the competition. At least, that’s the only conclusion to draw from numbers examined by Engadget this morning.

The evidence is pretty damning: of the iTunes top 10 downloads, all but a few carry the maximum price of $1.29, while Amazon’s top 10 list (which is almost identical) holds steady at $0.99 for each and every one. Both stores sell DRM-free files, encoded at 256kbps.

The days of the $0.99-for-everything iTunes store are over. Of course, when Apple introduced the variable pricing feature into the iTunes store, they touted it as a way to get lower-priced songs — as low as $0.69, in fact. But what’s actually happened is the opposite. Thanks to the death of the album (something we can thank iTunes and other music downloading services for), labels are trying to squeeze as many dollars as possible out of the single song hits that get downloaded over and over again.

Now, Amazon has the exact same pricing structure as Apple. There are indeed songs at the $1.29 price point in the Amazon catalog — there just aren’t any at that price in the top ten downloads. The interesting thing about this, though, is that these song prices aren’t set by Amazon or Apple. They’re set by the music labels themselves.

So what’s going on here? If the labels are trying to undermine Apple’s position as market leader — and thus take away some of the company’s bargaining power — this is one place to start. Apple still has the advantage, since the iTunes store is integrated into the music playing software (and in the case of the iPhone, the device itself). People will probably pay a little extra for the convenience, but we’ll have to wait and see if this is part of a concerted effort or just a one-time blip.

Posted in iTunes |