Whitney Houston
© Minyanville
Last year, Microsoft came under fire for turning singer Amy Winehouse's death into a money-making opportunity. Only a few months after Bing used the devastating earthquake in Japan as Twitter ad campaign, Redmond promoted Winehouse's album Back to Black with its Zune Twitter account and urged fans to download it from the music service. Following the backlash, Microsoft released a statement: "Apologies to everyone if our earlier Amy Winehouse 'download' tweet seemed purely commercially motivated. Far from the case, we assure you."

And as that mea culpa failed to convince us otherwise, another posthumous money grab has revealed a corporation's true intentions, however ghoulish.

This past Saturday, world-renowned pop singer Whitney Houston died from an apparent drug overdose in a Los Angeles hotel room. Almost immediately, as fans were flooding the iTunes Store and Amazon to download her music, the price of her greatest hits album The Ultimate Collection rose from £4.99 to £7.99 in iTunes.

Believing this to be another act of capitalizing off the death of another famous singer, fans railed against Apple for cashing in. Twitter user @CallumGriffiths wrote, "Understandable that she would go up in the charts, but that's just making every last penny they can from her death!"

However, as it turns out, it wasn't Apple that raised the price of the album. It was Sony.

According to the Guardian, Sony -- which owns the rights to The Ultimate Collection -- raised the wholesale price of the album, which also automatically boosted the retail price on iTunes. An insider claimed that the move wasn't a "cynical" gesture, rather a corrective review of the wholesale price that just happened to occur after the singer passed away.

Yeah, that's completely forgivable.

As of Sunday, the cost of the album was reduced to its original price. So you have to assume Sony is now watching the health of Cyndi Lauper with fevered interest.