$.99 ... Or $1.29?

After receiving a Christmas card which included a iTunes gift card earlier today, I decided it was time for me to do some shopping. When looking for the perfect album, which happened to be the Vince Guaraldi Trio's "A Charlie Brown Christmas", in case you were wondering, I noticed price differentiation in popular music and just other music. I found that music that was more popular, say in the top 50 on the iTunes charts, were a whopping $1.29, rather than the standard iTunes $.99.

I think this is very interesting. iTunes can have a 30% increase in their music sales profit simply because they are charging more for the more popular music. I looked into it a little bit more and saw that the music prices were being raised because of they quality of the music was increasing, but I am not so sure about this. I believe that if you are increasing the quality of the music and would like to charge more for it, I believe you need to offer both types of qualities for people to purchase. If you are offering both with promises that one sounds better than the other, it is more than likely that people will spend the extra 30 cents and go for the nicer quality.

In conclusion, I think that this is a great way to increase your profit on your music sales, but to not offer anything else to your consumers is definitely taking advantage of your customers. If you are not giving them as choice to spend more on your higher quality music, than I believe people will be more than likely to purchase elsewhere, or even pirate the music, in which case nobody is making profit off of the music.

So, what do you think? Should iTunes offer both qualities of music to fit peoples budget and give them a choice, or is the 30 cents not worth anything to the customers, and they will buy it anyway?