Amazon is now deep-discounting select MP3 albums, part of an effort to generate more excitement among music fans.
The sale features short drops on selected titles, often to bargain basement levels. For example, Coldplay’s X&Y recently dropped to $1.99, along with a host of other Coldplay catalog titles.
At the tail end of the week, five titles are being collectively discounted to $5 as part of the “Friday Fives” campaign. Other albums will be dropped as low as 99-cents, depending on the title and day. That is part of a fresh sales experiment, one that complements already-discounted tags on a number of albums.
Now, the question is whether consumers will respond to the flash-discount approach to variable pricing. According to one executive, Amazon is now dabbling with “Russian prices,” a reference to the now-defunct AllofMP3 and other deep-discount sites, though lower-priced experimentation could raise broader sales volumes.