Following hot on the heels of Apple's announcement bringing variable track pricing to the iTunes Music Store, MP3 retailers Amazon, Wal-Mart and others announced this morning they'll be doing the same. Cloud music store Lala calls the sweeping change an "industry shift" on their blog, revealing a bit more transparency about who is behind the new pricing scheme — record labels, who have managed to renegotiate their contracts with digital retailers to effect what Ars Technica refers to astutely as a "popularity tax." A select number of tracks go up 30 cents to $1.29, which is theoretically supposed to be offset by a lower $0.69 price for some "less popular" and older tracks.

To me this smells like a throwback to the age of buying packaged discs consisting of one hot single and 10-12 filler songs. The advent of a la carte track pricing was a brilliant end-run around that music industry practice, which obviously sent an astonishing wake-up call to the RIAA goons that consumers are less willing to pay for crappy music when it comes unbundled from the small bit of value they truly wanted. Now they've successfully introduced the variable pricing filler tax to shore up their flagging coffers — hats off, guys! After all, even print publishers know that success in business is all about extracting more payment from that pesky, penny-pinching consumer.

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