The Artist Formerly Known as Reasonable: Prince's Internet Issues

The UK's Daily Mirror ran an interview this week with pop icon Prince that's being panned all over the place because of the many outrageous statements the pop icon made therein about selling music on the internet.

The juciest excerpts:

"The internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it."

"The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good."

And so another popstar from the 80s refuses to come to grips with the cultural and financial realities of modern media. Or so he would have us believe.

The real reason for the granting of this exclusive interview seems to hinge on the promotion of an exclusive Prince CD release. Exclusive to? Buyers of the print editions of these same UK newspapers, of course. The CD is being bundled with the weekend edition for a consideration. I know, you're shocked to find this out.

In the interview he also also railed about the evil of pop culture and said that we all need more god in our lives.

That kind of absurdist celebrity prattle gives me a laugh. I love the idea of a filthy rich popstar wagging his finger at me about the evil of modern sexuality and telling me I need more god in my life. Especially when the popstar in question made the lion's share of his fortune by shrieking about kinky sex with women in tacky camisoles.

But I digress. What about the marketing wisdom of this move? The pros & cons:

Pro
Prince has enough money to live comfortably for a couple of dozen lifetimes. Nothing he does or says in the music world will degrade his quality of life at this point. So if, at the age of 52, he's still in the music game has a hunger to win and little to lose, why not lob a Hail Mary pass in the air and see what happens? He's been successful with bold moves before, bolstering flagging interest in his brand by pulling that ridiculous "my-name-is-now-a-symbol" stunt a couple of decades ago.

Prince minus controversy = no record label. Be outrageous; get your name on people's tongues again and find new audiences as you enter your fifth decade as a performing artist.

This anti-tech pose could work well for Prince at a time where there is a growing feeling among many that we are all becoming somewhat overconnected. With much rethinking of what we may have lost through the convenience of online digital media, Prince may be working some kind of angle as an anti-tech folk hero, and he's just enough of an old-timer to pull that off.

And it warms me to know that after Prince's decade-long flirtation with the Jehovah's Witnesses – a religious cult noteworthy for being the only collection of people in the world more humorless than Prince himself – he's getting really serious about the boutique celebrity cult thing and becoming a Luddite.

Con
This is an era where millions of musicians around the globe are merely struggling to find an audience and hoping make a few bucks as a bonus. To a music fan, the idea of some popstar Citizen Kane snarling about the paltry size of his publishing and mechanicals royalty rates has to be a major turnoff. And a major challenge; I would bet that there are more than a few wise guys out there right now who are ripping the entire Prince discography into crappy 128k MP3s for upload to Pirate Bay on general principles.

And of course the most obvious flub: looking old and out of touch. It may please Prince's formerly bad self to know that there are some things that haven't changed about pop music, and one of them is that looking like an old cretin still hurts your ability to move units. Only now, this very successful icon is very much on the wrong side of that strategy.

But...
...in the short term, the interview/sweetheart deal promo has to be considered a winner. By virtue of a few inflammatory comments being broadcast over the net, he's got ME and many others writing about him in our tech/media/marketing blogs. That should sell a lot of papers in the UK and get 20TEN into a lot of Amazon carts. So he's already making inroads into new territory without licensing even one track in the iTunes store.

As a distribution strategy it's dumb, but for brand awareness it's great; the interview's viral coverage is probably going to be a more successful online marketing concept than anything else he could have pulled off. That crazy purple fox has struck again.