Slashdot Mirror
Sony Raises Price of Whitney Houston's Music 30 Minutes After Death
First time accepted submitter M.Nunez writes "Just 30 minutes after Whitney Houston died, Sony Music raised the price of Houston's greatest hits album, 'Ultimate Collection,' on iTunes and Amazon. Many technologists, including chairman of the NY Tech Meetup Andrew Rasiej, suggests that Sony should be boycotted for the move. In a tweet, Rasiej wrote, 'Geez Sony raised price on Whitney Houston's music 30 min after death was announced. #FAIL...We should boycott Sony.'"
But, to be fair, this seems to have been a simple mistake by a single employee, and was quickly corrected. Linking through to the NYT article:
"the changes - which were in effect only on the British version of iTunes, and were reversed Sunday evening...the price increase was the result of an error by a Sony employee in Britain, and that the company gave no orders for prices to be raised on Ms. Houston's music."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
According to other sites that ran this story ages ago the pricing was done by an algorithm that detected the increase in sales and raised the price to maximise on those sales.
Plus it was stated that Apple only take 30% of iTunes revenue, SONY (and that other labels) set the prices.
Who knows?
Tagged: diesonydie
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Maximizing profit != price fixing. Also increasing the price of a product when the artist dies is also not illegal. So you know, price fixing means you collude with some other party to only buy or sell a product at a fixed price through controlling supply and demand. There was no price fixing in this case.
This article is assuming we shouldn't have been boycotting Sony already.
Silly people... why do they need so much time to learn?
Sony are a bunch of vultures, what's there to learn? Everybody knows how vultures behave.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Tom Petty was going bankrupt even while he had hit records. The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Eagles and King Crimson all have no lack of horror stories about the record and publishing companies consistently screwing them on royalties, flagrantly violating contracts and in going out of their way to prevent the artists and the lawyers from looking at actual sales.
Whatever artists might be losing to illegal downloads, you can be sure that it is small potatoes to the rackateering that RIAA members have been up to for decades.
If you want to talk about real evil, you should look at the record companies treated artists like Bo Diddley, which amounted to userious contracts and outright theft.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
article is assuming we shouldn't have been boycotting Sony already.
Well, my first thought was that I can't boycott Sony over this, because I haven't bought anything of theirs since back when they were caught including rootkits on their CDs.
I don't know if it's possible to do two boycotts against the same company simultaneously. If so, you would one do it?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.