Sony Music has come under fire after it increased the price of a Whitney Houston album on Apple's iTunes Store hours after the singer was found dead. 
 
 The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston's greatest hits album, The Ultimate Collection, at about 4am California time on Sunday. This meant that the iTunes retail price of the album automatically increased from £4.99 to £7.99. 
 
 Houston's The Ultimate Collection, originally released in 1997, was the second top-selling album on iTunes on Monday morning. Apple returned the album to its original price late on Sunday. 
 
 Music fans described the move as a cynical attempt to capitalise on Houston's in-demand greatest hits records. The price hike came as tributes flooded in for the singer, whose catalogue includes hits such as I Wanna Dance With Somebody and I Will Always Love You. Houston was found dead in her Los Angeles hotel room on Saturday afternoon, local time, at the age of 48. 
 
 The change happened when Sony Music, which owns the rights to much of Houston's back catalogue, increased the wholesale price of The Ultimate Collection. This automatically boosted the retail price of the popular album, although Apple is responsible setting the price paid by music fans. 
 
 It is understood that the change occurred after Sony Music reviewed Houston's iTunes catalogue after the singer was pronounced dead. 
 
 One insider close to the situation said the price hike was not a "cynical" move – but that the wholesale price of Houston's The Ultimate Collection was wrong. The change in wholesale price boosted the album's retail price on iTunes. 
 
 Houston's The Ultimate Collection and Whitney – The Greatest Hits were in the top three albums on iTunes at noon on Monday. 
 
 Apple and Sony Music declined to comment. ||||| Sales of pop icon Whitney Houston's records have soared since it was announced that the singer was found dead in a bathtub at Los Angeles' Beverly Hilton Hotel. 
 
 Seven of Houston's records are currently in the top 10 on Amazon.com's best sellers in music list, and the legendary singer who died at the age of 48 was only edged out of the top spot by singer Adele, who took home six Grammy awards Sunday night. Houston's compilation "Whitney Houston - The Greatest Hits" comes in at number two. 
 
 Fans instantly drove Houston to number one the iTunes charts as well, with her cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" shooting to the top of the site's charts and becoming the number one download. Her 1980s classic "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" is also in the top 10, and a number of the singer's other singles quickly re-entered the iTunes top 100. 
 
 Apple has been accused of cashing in on Houston's unexpected death by hiking the price of the download since the news of her death broke. Houston's 2007 Ultimate Collection increased by £3 to £7.99 in the space of just 30 minutes, according to the website Digital Spy. 
 
 It is expected that mourning fans will keep the singer's albums and singles at the top of the charts over the next few weeks. ||||| Lady Gaga has made herself a paragon of pop ambition and a spokeswoman for equal rights, but on Monday she became an unwitting symbol for something else: the pitfalls of cloud computing. 
 
 “Born This Way” (Interscope), her new album, arrived with a blitz of marketing, and Amazon surprised the singer’s fans by offering a one-day sale of the MP3 version of the album for 99 cents, a full $11 less than its price at iTunes, the Web’s dominant music retailer. 
 
 The discount was widely seen as a way for Amazon to promote its new Cloud Drive service, which allows users to store music files on remote servers and stream them over the Internet to their computer or smartphone. But Amazon may have underestimated the zeal (or thrift) of Lady Gaga’s fans. By early afternoon the company’s servers stalled, and many users were unable to download or listen to the album in full. Frustrated customers quickly took to Twitter and to Amazon’s user review page for “Born This Way.” 
 
 “Very disappointed,” a customer wrote in a one-star review of the album. “I guess next time I will pay full price and get the album immediately on iTunes.” 
 
 Amazon’s only public comment on the matter was a Twitter message, sent about 1:15 p.m. Eastern time: “We’re currently experiencing very high volume. If you order today, you will get the full @ladygaga album for $.99. Thanks for your patience.” 
 
 Most music companies see cloud services — which promise that all your music will be available on all your devices at any time — as the next frontier for the industry. And for the retailers and technology companies that will operate them, such services have become in important battleground. Google unveiled its own cloud service, Music Beta, this month, and Apple was said to be close to introducing its own. 
 
 Amazon offers customers five free gigabytes of space on its Cloud Service and increases it to 20 gigabytes for customers who buy an album. 
 
 “What Amazon is trying to do is build up as much share as possible before Apple comes in,” said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with NPD Group, a market research firm. 
 
 Some analysts and music executives said the problem could affect confidence in an unfamiliar technology. Last month a variety of Web sites, from start-ups like GroupMe.com to The New York Times, were affected by a failure on servers that Amazon rents for cloud computing. 
 
 “It’s perhaps not a fatal flaw that this happened, but it certainly creates a challenge for them,” said Matthew Eastwood, an analyst at IDC, a firm that researches technology. “There is not a lot of forgiveness for things like this in the market. People will tend to move on and find other suppliers.” 
 
 Amazon introduced its MP3 store in 2007, but it has struggled to compete with iTunes. Late last year the NPD Group estimated that iTunes’s share of the digital download market was 66.2 percent and Amazon’s was 13.3 percent. 
 
 Amazon often sells albums through one-day promotions for $4 or $5. Music executives have said that Amazon usually accepts the loss if it sells an album for less than the wholesale price charged by the labels, which is typically around $7 an album but may be more for a priority release. Amazon declined to comment beyond its Twitter message, and a representative of Lady Gaga’s record label, Interscope, did not respond to e-mails requesting comment. 
 
 Other industry observers questioned whether Amazon’s error with Lady Gaga downloads would have a lasting effect on such a popular store. 
 
 “People are having a headache for one dollar,” said Tamara Conniff, a former editor of Billboard who is the founder of TheComet.com, a music news and opinion site. “They’d be willing to try it again for another dollar. Full price is another story.”
– On Saturday, a Whitney Houston greatest-hits album cost about $8 in the UK iTunes store; but shortly after the singer was found dead, it had jumped to a little more than $12.50. The changed sparked a customer uproar. "It is just a case of iTunes cashing in on the singer's death, which in my opinion is totally parasitic," said one, according to DigitalSpy. But the Guardian reports that it was Sony, not iTunes, that was responsible for the change—which has now been reversed. Sony boosted the wholesale price of Houston's 1997 Ultimate Collection, which iTunes currently says isn't available in its US store. It was the second-bestselling album as of this morning, the Guardian notes. Sony's change wasn't "cynical," said an insider: Sony reviewed Houston's catalog after her death, and found that the wholesale price was simply wrong. Regardless of the controversy, Houston's sales are soaring since her death, ABC News notes, with seven of her records in Amazon's music top 10. (Click to read about an eerie twist in Houston's death, involving her daughter.)