Sony Raises Price of Whitney Houston's Music 30 Minutes After Death 507
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.'"
Yes, Sony is evil... (Score:5, Informative)
"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."
Re:Price fixing... (Score:5, Informative)
Plus it was stated that Apple only take 30% of iTunes revenue, SONY (and that other labels) set the prices.
Who knows?
Tagged: diesonydie
Re:Price fixing... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:We should boycott only now? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:They all do this. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:We should boycott only now? (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:We should boycott only now? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sony is a Profit-Oriented Corporation (Score:3, Informative)
On second thought, even *I* find the phrase "corporate cancer" stupid and needlessly offensive; but I was just rambling, you know... but what *really* gets you is that I exaggerate numbers (simply meaning "a very small part", exaggerating as to make sure it's not intended to be an exact figure), or "kinda bring up" that that Disney singlehandedly is responsible for a lot of copyright extension* --- ??? Just wow. So on second thought, I'd like to laugh even harder ^^
(* which is rather obviously NOT for the benefit of the authors, the goal that copyright bases its existence on. which is why they call it "intellectual property" now, as if questioning that would make you a commie or something -- I condense this stuff because I can't be arsed to write an essay, and unless you want to pay me to do otherwise, you can go and fuck yourself :P)
Re:We should boycott only now? (Score:4, Informative)
a very different company in this case being the direct successor to the entity which did put rootkits on CDs with Sony Music being formed by Sony buying out the 50% share from Bertelsmann AG.
It like the difference between night and... well, slightly later that same night.
The problem with economic theory (Score:4, Informative)
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.