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.

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.]

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.)

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.]