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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.
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
Since when is it illegal to price your product to make as much of a profit as possible? (That's not what's generally meant by "price fixing," by the way.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
If a company charges too much, they're guilty of "price gouging."
If they charge too little, they're guilty of "dumping."
If they charge the same as their competitors, they're guilty of "price fixing."
Welcome to the "free market."
Liberty in your lifetime
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.
No, but there was dickishness on an epic scale. What they did is clearly legal, but absurdly scummy. A boycott would be a very appropriate measure.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
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 !
"supply and demand" isn't a very useful descriptive tool when the supply is infinite and valueless. More like, "access control and demand"...
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.
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!