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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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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.
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
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
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.
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 !
Who's benefiting?
Presumably, the person buying the album. I didn't buy a sandwich today to support the restaurant owner, I bought it because I was hungry and thought it would taste good.
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
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!
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.
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.