Raising Houston Music Prices Good Business, Bad PR
Two words: dynamic pricing. Those could be magic words in the media business these days.
When you walk into Wal-Mart and see the DVD released last week, you’ll pay $28 for it. In two weeks, $21; in 3 months, $14. That’s just cashing in on demand - it’s the most common practice in the retail world.
But we don’t live in the DVD world any more, we now live in the digital distribution world, where prices can be altered as quickly and easily as updating a twitter account. That’s dynamic pricing. (See local gas station for another common example).
You won’t see a Wal-Mart employee running down the music aisle with a price gun after hearing of a singer’s untimely death, but I bet that if they knew it would bring in an extra $2-million, they would send someone sprinting.
Hard to blame Sony for dynamic music price
So I find it hard to blame the reported mid-level Sony executive who raised the price of Whitney Houston’s digital music downloads in the wake of her death this week.
