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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.'"
Bunch of f-ing assholes.
Tacky? Sure. Taking advantage of the situation? Yup. But they have a right to make money for their product.
When an artists dies, many people rush right out to purchase that artist's work. It's as if people think they suddenly won't be able to get it again now that the artist is dead.
There should be an investigation for price manipulation for that. They sue people for "copying" music for several hundred times the digital price, yet they pull dick moves like this and expect people to just ignore it as a normal matter of business. If there was going to be a run on resources, like in the production of CDs, I could see increasing the price to help open up a new line or two to produce more to compensate, but its digital. There's ONE master. They produce NOTHING, just data. Outside of bandwidth considerations, there's no significant additional cost to them over what's already being used.
It was actually a gesture of sympathy to Whitney Houston's dependents. Since copyright lasts forever now, long after the death of the artist, they raised the price of the music so her estate will receive larger royalty checks for awhile.
... i kid of course. We all know Sony and the other RIAA members never _actually_ pay out royalties to artists.
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They are running a business and trying to make money. It's the same reason that I don't "support" their products. I don't care about Sony because they don't care about me. Also, If I wanted those albums, I'd torrent. She's dead anyway.
I've been boycotting them for years, starting with their rootkits on CDs, which should have been charged as a criminal act.
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
But logical. Fact is, I bet they earned more money from her death in these past few days than perhaps all last year alone. From a business perspective, you would be stupid not to raise the price. Bad PR yada yada yada. Give it a week and the bitching will stop and sales will increase. Money talks.
Oh look. Shiny!
Life is not for the lazy.
You already hate Sony. Sony already hates you. You're not Sony's primary audience. Sony's primary audience won't notice things like this.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This article is assuming we shouldn't have been boycotting Sony already.
Silly people... why do they need so much time to learn?
Is there anyone here on Slashdot that's willing to admit they own a Whitney Houston song?
#DeleteChrome
I'm sure they were just doing their part to prevent iTunes and Amazon from crashing under heavy load.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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
...and why the hell not? Tupac released more albums when he was dead than when he was alive.
Proof, once again, that he is not really dead but living on a secret island with Elvis and Steve Erwin.
Price still seems to be $0.00 on The Pirate Bay...
Liberty in your lifetime
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/sony-says-price-of-2-whitney-houston-albums-was-raised-by-mistake/
According to the NYTimes the price raising was a mistake that only affected the UK Itunes store and nothing else. So of all the retailers and online shops only one was affected, Itunes, and only one region, the UK. If SONY wanted to capitalize on her death they likely would have raised prices across the board and just not the UK Itunes shop.
This probably was an error. Someone assigned to managing SONY's UK Itunes account royally fucked up by changing the price. And now it is basically a PR disaster because even though it likely was an accident SONY looks absolutely retarded. Someone will lose his or her job over this for sure.
Sadly I'm sure that some sneering fuck CEO from the RIAA or MAFIAA or SONY or whatever is sitting on his throne thinking of ways to capitalize on Whitney Houston's death without taking a major PR hit. They see her death as basically an opportunity for a lot of profit and a great time to line their pockets.
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.
It can be argued (rather convincingly, IMO) that the problem with "economics 101" is that, by and large, #1 is a grossly incorrect premise.
And the market conditions determine what the price is. Sure you would pay more for food during natural disasters. This is a common theme on reddit "That big company did that, those assholes, how could they?"
If you are so pissed off about it, wait until the storm passes away and buy it then. Grow up and have a little bit of patience.
You will never have experience until after you needed it.
Sony is a profit-oriented corporation
Their mission is to make profit
Whitney Houston's death was a chance for Sony to make more money, so they took it
I really can't blame Sony for doing such a thing, even when it's kind of bad taste
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...those who are buying her music after her death are equally parasitic and not really deserving of any breaks.
I fail to see how buying her music shortly after her death is parasitic.
If you really want to support an artist, support the artist when he or she is still alive
What good would it do for Whitney Houston if you go out and buy tons of Whitney Houston CDs after she is dead?
I mean, she's already dead, no matter how much royalty generates from your purchase of her songs / CD won't do her any more good
Just like those who pays hundreds of millions for paintings painted by dead painters.
Who's benefiting?
The painters who are already long dead?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I do, the problem is there is rarely anything worth buying
If what you say is true, why does copyright exists beyond the artist's life?
Well, it's the politicians who re-wrote the copyright laws, after receiving $$$ from the PACs representing the "copyright owners", aka, the corporations
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
sounds like a good coput to me. How convenient that it was a "rogue employee" that just happened to raise the prices of a singer who died only 30 minutes earlier... im sorry, I simply dont believe it. If it was someone other than sony, I MIGHT believe it, but coming from sony, after the past mistakes, I simply cannot believe that excuse. They got called out for doing something dickish, and they are tyring to save face.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
For fuck's sake, we aren't talking about slavery or child labor here, nor dumping chemicals into drinking water. We're talking about a higher price on a luxury item, a luxury item you could likely get at the same, lower price a month from now. This is what we find despicable? Prices of MP3s? Get a grip!
I don't know if it's possible to do two boycotts against the same company simultaneously. If so, you would one do it?
I worked this out: First go fire up torrents of all the Sony artists you can find and download every Sony .mp3 on the net. Then, once you are done, go delete all the .mp3s and do the whole thing again. There you have just "Stolen" their entire catalog twice. That will show the corporate bastards that the Intarweb is not to be trifled with!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Of approximately the same degree of bad taste as asking the widow of a person out on a date at the man's funeral.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Along with brands like Pioneer back in the '70s and '80s, they helped make decent hi-fi gear affordable. With the Walkman they launched the entire portable audio market, and they co-invented the CD. Their Trinitron TVs and monitors were well-respected, and they were a major player in developing the portable camcorder market as well.
Then in 1987 they acquired CBS Records, and in 1989 they acquired Columbia Pictures; this started them down the road to becoming a "content" company. It's been all downhill ever since. Quality of their hardware declined sharply; the last piece of Sony electronics I bought was a Digital-8 camcorder around 7 years ago, and it sucked. Debacles like the CD rootkit incident, the controversial change in stance over 3rd party code on the PS3, and the PSN security breach have now become the norm.
In my lifetime the Sony brand has transformed itself from something I actively sought out, to something akin to a warning label. It's a damn shame; I now go out of my way to avoid their products.
RIP Sony, you are dead to me.
It is all for the protection of young, emerging artists.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
here is the original guardian article which helped kick up the stink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/13/whitney-houston-album-price
thou to be honest Twitter was where it was originally tweeted about, with people initially blaming Apple.
here is a more recent article
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57378242-501465/whitney-houston-itunes-prices-hiked-by-mistake-says-sony/
where Sony are saying it was all a mistake by some guy in England.
Your suggestion that we can't do anything is false, public opinion matters, from a few tweets Sony's stirred up the ant nest and now has to back pedal furiously.
Another example
Apple is having to do something to protect its sales due to bad publicity about the working conditions of the people producing its products.
Then there are the various civil wars that are taking place, last summers riots in the UK even the back pedalling on ACTA in Europe. All pretty much a case of a lot of little david's going up against goliaths and kicking arse.
The UK riots were an interesting one social media helped fan the flames but it also helped mobilise people to fight back and clean up with huge numbers of people taking to the streets with brooms to reclaim their communities.
The situation has changed where once the Goliaths could pretty much get away with anything and david pretty much muttered under his breath and was ignored. Now David tweets and posts on facebook and pretty quickly the discontent spreads and Goliath is having to back down.
David probably has more power to change things than ever before and governments and corporations are becoming uncomfortably aware that this is the case and having to act accordingly.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Thank god I snatched up one of these rare MP3 before Sony ran out of stock!
The problem with economic theory is that it is based on a _perfect_ world. It's just handwaved that, uh, well, it works close enough in the real world.
Among the assumptions that are necessary to have most of that shiny-happy outcome for everything -- and I mean, really, necessary, as once you have a margin of error, real world starts to happen -- are such gems as:
- many manufacturers of perfectly homogenous and fungible products. Which works well if you're buying orange juice, but less well when your brand of pneumonia is only sensitive to the latest patented antibiotic.
- zero (or negligible) entry and exit barriers. This is in fact needed both for the previous one, as well as to prevent collusion. In a market where it costs nothing to enter or to exit if it didn't work, you can't form a cartel to regulate the price of bread, because someone else will then start making bread anyway and undercut you. This assumption is increasingly false in the real world, with entry barriers in some domains being in the many billions range. No, really, try starting a CPU manufacturing company.
- perfectly informed buyers. To have any chance that the market punishes behaviours X, Y and Z, or even rewards fine differences in quality, basically all (or the vast majority) of buyers must know that stuff. Again, this is not only getting to be very false, but most corporations actively work through marketing and PR to make sure that you care more about their beer making you cool than whether beer X actually tastes better than beer Y.
- perfectly rational everyone, including buyers and sellers. Which already is false in the case discussed here. Perfectly rational buyers would buy her music because the genuinely like them more than some other music, not just because they heard she died.
- no externalities. An assumption which may be mostly correct for music, but is also something that produced barely breathable smog and other problem at the times it was basically true.
- perfectly elastic supply and demand mechanics. Which sadly was only really true up to the start of the 20'th century. The Great Depression arguably happened when we ran into a domain where things started to be inelastic.
Etc.
What I'm getting at is that while this kind of thing makes for a great BS libertarian rhetoric, it is very much divorced from reality. In the perfect world used in such economic theory, monopolies are impossible, in the real world they are a fact of life. In the perfect world used in such economic theory, collusion isn't viable, in the real world there are real cases where for example a bunch of big pharma companies agreed to not undercut each other. In that ideal world you couldn't make money by recommending that other people invest in the same imploding dot-com that you're selling your shares in, because buyers would already be informed, but in the real world it actually happened. Etc.
If you were a really merciless investor, you'd also know that, and factor it in. E.g., you'd know that if you make ten millions and then have to pay a million to PR to whitewash your image, then, meh, being an asshole actually paid.
And in the end, that's the real difference between those who actually know how to abuse an imperfect market, and idealist nerds who think the world works like in perfect-world BS propaganda.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.