Digital Home Thoughts: Sony Artists Suffer on Amazon

"Business Week built a piece on following the sales ranking for Sony rootkit artists (to coin a phrase), many of which have plummeted. Again, I have to wonder whether Sony will soon face a lawsuit from one of its artists. In Amazon, the problem isn’t only disintegrating sales rankings. Customers are flocking to the album pages and expressing their Sony hatred by bestowing one-star ratings on the albums. This is vicious, and unfair. People look at the overall rating, which is an average of the individual star-ratings. To glean a quick impression of a product’s quality. People browsing through Amazon might and might not read the reviews (which excoriate Sony even if the reviewers like the album) associated with one-star ratings. Trey Anastasio’s page for the "Shine" CD has been painfully reduced to two stars because of a flood of one-star reviews criticizing Sony."

Ouch, harsh stuff. So here is what happened - to prevent audiophiles from making multiple copies of the CDs, Sony programmed disks with a hidden code called a "rootkit" that secretly installs itself on hard drives when the CDs are loaded onto listeners' PCs. Soon enough, hackers began designing viruses to take malicious advantage of the hidden program, and a Sony boycott had begun. The outrage against Sony got so bad that people started rating the artists really low on Amazon. And since consumers on Amazon tend to base their decisions on the sales ranks and ratings, CDs by artists sponsored by Sony weren't getting bought. How truly sad!