So we’re going back to making this a marketing blog rather than a place for me to be mad about losing the Sonics. 

If you read other marketing blogs, you probably have already come across this pricing strategy.  Seth Godin commeted on it, and it is an interesting concept for an online space – letting people choose how much they want to pay based on how "prestigious" they want their version of a product to be.

In this execution, it’s t-shirts.  Pay more money to get the #100 in the set than #1.  This artifically inflates the average price of the total shirt run.  (However, I’m not sure I understand why #1 isn’t the most expensive.)

I’m not sure how applicable that model is for mp3’s, software or anything else that you want to sell 100,000 of.  But is is similar to an industry in the UAE, where people bid on License Plate NUmbers  Here’s an excerpt from a good read:

Soft-spoken and modestly dressed, 34-year-old Al-Mannaei says he closely controls supply, releasing low-digit plates “almost scientifically.” The result, he says, is a frenzy for even mediocre numbers. In the last two auctions, three-digit plates fetched between $123,000 and $150,000 each, more than double the prices last fall. In the 10 auctions held so far, buyers spent roughly $120 million for 900 plates; the government plans to use the money to build a new trauma hospital for traffic-accident victims.

So I think the point is that we have a pretty untapped ability to start monkeying around with pricing models in the world of online selling.  And I haven’t seen anyone who has really nailed it yet, so there’s lots of room for good experimentation and clever ideas.