There is a very good reason though for his stance on music sharing sites because Prince, perhaps more so than any other artist of his generation, was adamant about protecting his copyrights. “Then in each one of those situations, Tidal allowed us to go and work on those pages”, he said at the time.
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Prince, in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone that was only published after his death, not only confirmed a long-rumoured vault of music at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota, but said he had several of them.
That was one of the many great things about Prince: his physical beauty and charisma, coupled with the quality of his musicianship, meant that he managed to get away with lyrics that would have been mortifying coming from the lips of any other artist. I’ve been in meetings and they’ll tell you, Prince, you don’t understand, it’s dog-eat-dog out there.
Unlike Kanye West, Prince released his music to be streamed on Tidal alone, as the service streams music in high fidelity (Prince was big on ensuring his music was heard as he intended, not compressed down into an easy-to-stream-and-download MP3 file), and shares its profits more equitably with the artists.
Vanessa Grigoriadis, who conducted the interview, humorously pointed out in the story that despite his feelings about cell phones, there was no denying that Prince was one of the earliest adopters of phone-text-speak with songs like “I Would Die 4 U” and ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. It’s like the gold rush out there. “You’re getting sound in bits. We’re analogue people, not digital”.
Prince was one of the first major musicians to sell his music online – his 1997 album, “Crystal Ball“, was first released exclusively on the Internet.
The book Prince: Chaos, Disorder, and Revolution by Jason Draper also talks about Prince’s battle for his music rights.
When Warner Brothers tried to rein him in, Prince changed his name to the unpronounceable “love symbol” and wrote “slave” on his cheek to protest his contractual obligations.
But in 2010 Prince was, as usual, ahead of the times.
Price’s future is still possible: New platforms, books and entire transaction systems were created in the past decade to bring about Prince’s imagined internet, where artists could reach their fans and find a fair wage. The artist once had this to say to the UK’s Mirror about Apple.
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Apple Company account Beats 1 Radio Tweeted, “Lighting the airwaves purple”.
