And now, The Sun
Published:
February 13, 2012 at 1:18pm
After the collapse of The News of the World in a mire of phone-hacking and corruption allegations, now it looks to be The Sun’s turn. Rupert Murdoch is flying to Britain to deal with a situation in which five staff members at The Sun have been arrested on corruption charges, accused of bribing police and public officials for information.
Meanwhile, there has been the inevitable black humour. I received the following when news of Whitney Houston’s death broke.
Rupert Murdoch is said to be deeply touched by the messages from family and friends left on Whitney Houston’s phone.
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Nice one – I may nick that, Daphne.
This joke has been used for every famous person that died since the News of the World scandal.
I hope The Sun will be saved. Labour was lining up some of its local council candidates for a Page 3 appearance.
Talking about Whitney, just 30 minutes after she died, Sony Music raised the price of her music on iTunes by over 60% from £4.99 to £7.99. Then they wonder why the file-sharing sites are all the rage.
Yes, Sony later lowered the price again (presumably when someone talked some sense into their heads) but not before showing how shameless and greedy they are.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/13/whitney-houston-digital-music-price-hike/
[Daphne – That’s not shameless greed. That’s business. Businesses are there to make a profit. They’re not charities. This is something fundamental which people with a strong socialist mentality can’t understand. And yes, it’s possible to have a strong socialist mentality even if you don’t vote Labour. Without businesses, you wouldn’t have the products you want, so you have more to be grateful for than angry about. Why is this so hard to understand? The price of goods and services goes up when people want them. It goes down when people don’t want them. If you like the latter, you have to accept the former.]
You read me wrong, Daphne – nothing about socialism in my thinking. I’m one of those marketing types who values respect for the customer as a top priority.
Business is about selling for the the highest price that people are *willing to pay*, with those three words being the operative ones. At the same time, business is also about maintaining a good relationship with your customers and keeping them happy – something that is not compatible with trying to shaft them at the first opportunity.
Like it or not, the fact is that Sony is competing against piracy and this is a lost game until Sony find a way to offer better value than the pirates – to give fans something that the pirates can’t. In this case, they have a great opportunity to sell a limited edition CD + booklet or whatever, which they will surely do sooner or later. Now, imagine if they offered an optional higher-priced digital download by bundling a pre-order for a physical souvenir and took advantage of the impulse buyers to sell a product they did not yet have. Now that would be smart.
(As an aside, I read an interesting comment the other day about how even Apple built a whole gadget industry that implicitly encourages piracy. This person asked if anyone ever thought how much it would cost to fill a 160 gigabyte iPod with legally purchased songs.)
Also, to clarify my first comment, I said ‘shameless greed’ because Sony was trying to make a quick buck at the expense of its image, rather than looking at the big picture and thinking of long-term profits and benefits. If you are so shortsighted to risk your customers’ loyalty for some quick cash, I call that greedy.
[Daphne – The opposite, actually. Greed looks at maximising profits through increasing customer loyalty, not reducing it.]
I`d agree that business is business, but hiking the price on the news of a singer’s death, in todays ‘social networking world’, hits the bad public relations more than it could rake in profits.
Business is business, but a quick buck today might cost more in the long run.