R.I.P. Prince

Prince’s fans are mourning Prince’s death last week and there have been many tributes to his life and career, including these two covers of Purple Rain – one from the New Yorker and the other from Bruce Springsteen.  As a Prince fan myself, I would like to pay tribute by writing this post about how Prince raised the issue of bargaining power on behalf of all artists.  

As blog readers of a certain age will remember, Prince changed his name to a symbol and became the artist formerly known as Prince (my keyboard won’t allow me to type the symbol) in protest over his contract with Warner Bros. which gave the company the rights to his master recordings.  (He ended up fulfilling his contract but let’s just say, it wasn’t his best work).  About a couple of years ago, Prince signed another contract with Warner Bros. which gave him the rights to his master recordings. Of course, a lot had changed during the two decades long interim but perhaps nothing changed things more than the Internet.  Large record companies no longer had the lock on distribution that they once did.  High profile clashes between artists and their distributors, like the one Prince had with Warner Bros, made younger musicians who otherwise might have been willing to sign it all away, think twice about what they were getting out of a record deal.

Prince, of course, had his own views about how the Internet benefited – and hurt – musicians.  As with his music, his views about the Internet and online distribution were ahead of their time.