This set off my poor taste alarm, but after thinking about it for a few moments it seems like one of the basic laws of supply & demand. But does that apply to music? I mean, the available supply stays constant no matter what the demand is. What do you think?
Seems to me that most of the time, they need to keep prices low to lure people in to buying her music. Now that she is in the news, they no longer need to lure people in so they can jack up the price to maximize profit.
It’s not like their supply is low, no. It’ll never be low when it comes to digital media. But the demand is high and that’s what you do with high demand goods.
Often the supply plummets after a celebrity death. When George Carlin died, most of his CDs went out of stock, and seemed also to go out of print. The same thing happened with Michael Jackson’s albums last year. I’m not sure why they couldn’t just increase supply to meet the demand for awhile. As for iTunes, they’re maximizing profits.
It’s more like maximizing profits or taking what the market will bear than supply and demand. It does look distasteful but I guess they’ve seen this phenomenon happen often enough with other celebrity deaths that they know it will work out in their favor.
A heads up. Since they are jacking up the price.
I’d avoid Whitney Houston Greatest Hits that came out in 2000. The second CD is nothing but remixes by DJ’s. A lot of fans were very disappointed. There’s a lot of negative reviews on the Amazon listing. Especially the American release. The UK version had more songs and was better.
Whitney Houston Ultimate Collection came out in 2007 and contains the original 80’s hits.
Meanwhile, Bobby Brown couldn’t decide on an opened or closed casket. So he chose a little crack.
The business decision makes sense, from a cold-hearted point of view, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be tasteless.
Tasteless, yes, and there could be a bit of a fan’s backlash. People don’t like being ripped off, and there is no justification for an overnight 60% increase. Might turn out to be a bad business decision.
My guess is they’ll apologize and donate 4 cents to a charity in her memory, keeping a tidy profit for themselves. This could lead to some fascinating real-world Death Pool applications- gradually raise the prices on the stars’ albums when it starts looking like they are likely to die. It’s probably the last way for the music industry to make money.
Is this an automated thing?
The server responsible for sales (whether digital or not) detects an “upsurge” in popularity of an item, and raises the price to meet the potential “demand”?
(Demand being defined as “what the customer is willing to pay” for a product or service.)
What’s worse is what’s to come. Now the record company will be taking all of her unreleased songs, they felt were garbage and that were too inferior for an album, and releasing them as “lost treasures, found again.”
That’s been common for decades, though. That can be a cynical and dishonest exercise, but it doesn’t have to be and at least you can say fans want to hear it. Jacking up the price on her albums because she just dropped dead is harder to defend.
I’m seeing reports now that the price of one best-of album was raised 30 minutes after she died. The news hadn’t been confirmed at this point. I guess we’ll see how it shakes out.