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Prince understood the Internet like a techie. Along with David Bowie these guys were both ten years ahead of their time in how they used the net. Now he did s

by rmason 3y ago

Prince understood the Internet like a techie. Along with David Bowie these guys were both ten years ahead of their time in how they used the net. Now he did say the Internet was dead in 2010. But I think it was because he felt the innovation had slowed or stopped. Yet that exact time was when a lot of companies that are giants today were founded. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/04/27/how-prince-revolutionized-the-internet-according-to-the-webmaster-who-helped-him-do-it/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/04...

vr46 3y ago
Prince didn’t understand at ALL, but he experimented a lot, repeatedly launching website projects for albums, creating short-lived memberships, failing to deliver e-commerce orders, and generally impatient with both results and his actual fans when we complained. Prince was ridiculously fickle and capricious, bringing chaos and disorder everywhere he seemed to go, but, quite frankly, we loved that side of it in a world that was highly organized. In 2014, our little fan group spent days combing Twitter and the news for intel on the next gig and a couple of thousand of us speculatively queued up in Camden ALL DAY - cold and wet - for a possible gig. Turned out to be two gigs in one evening. Did Prince get on Twitter to tell anyone? No. Did he launch a website? No. He did a random press conference a few days before from Lianne La Havas’s tiny flat. Did he take Bitcoin? No, it was cash on the door. So much of what he did from about 1994 on was driven by a slightly paranoid suspicion that he was being ripped off somewhere along the line and only he should control how his work was enjoyed, leading him into weird situations with his fans, other bands and musicians (remember his cover of Radiohead’s Creep), and it only really eased up once he STOPPED trying to work with internet technology and realized his performance skills were his bread and butter. While I absolutely love and adore his music, I consider him to be a control freak and a terrible communicator outside of the studio who couldn’t handle reality, which is probably what helped kill him in the end, along with some dumb beliefs. I could honestly kick Larry Graham in the balls for that. For plenty of supporting source material, check out Kevin Smith’s incredible answer to a question about Prince, go look up the Hit & Run tour, and the vast swathes of terrible album covers that helped to bury so much of his later work - that and the fact that you couldn’t buy many of these albums in the shops anyway.
- nostromo 3y ago
  Thanks for a fun bit of insight to a fan base. For those curious about the Creep cover: > The most jaw-dropping moment of the night came near the end of the main set when he broke out Radiohead’s “Creep.” He had never played the song in concert before (or any other Radiohead songs for that matter), but across eight glorious minutes, he completely made it his own. It popped up on YouTube the next morning – with shots from many different angles – but the Prince camp is extremely vigilant with the Internet and had them all taken down. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke found this hysterical. “Really? He’s blocked it?” York asked an interviewer. “Surely we should block it. Hang on a moment. Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our song.” It was hard to argue with that, and it remains on YouTube even though most Prince material has been yanked for quite some time. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/flashback-prince-plays-a-jaw-dropping-cover-of-creep-at-coachella-223898/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/flashback-prin... The cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uu5vMLufNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uu5vMLufNA
  - vr46 3y ago
    Thanks for links, really need to go listen to that tonight. Took years for Radiohead to play it again after originally getting sick of it, was stunned when I first heard them play it. There’s a band that REALLY understand things.
  - toyg 3y ago
    Technically there are two set of rights: writing and performing. In this case Radiohead own the former, but not the latter. Prince would still have been in his legal rights to block reproductions of that particular performance, and I'm sure he was advised as such; he probably just made a call based on marketing instincts or as a favour to Yorke.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  My wife was manager at a pop podium, and she worked on a day where Prince might give a concert (it was a surprise concert while he was in The Netherlands, though the rumors were omnipresent). As a huge Prince fan, she was happy she was able to witness that concert, but it was chaos as the man had to be paid in cash. Also the tax had to be deducted on the go. They had to count 150k EUR manually (one ticket cost 100 EUR). This was in 2010. Without context of that quote of Prince, it is a useless statement. Because many internet pioneers such as Marleen Stikker (DDS) also see the internet as (partly) failed.
JohnFen 3y ago
> Now he did say the Internet was dead in 2010. And he was right. By 2010, most of what made the internet great was already dead and gone.

by rmason 3y ago

vr46 3y ago

Prince didn’t understand at ALL, but he experimented a lot, repeatedly launching website projects for albums, creating short-lived memberships, failing to deliver e-commerce orders, and generally impatient with both results and his actual fans when we complained. Prince was ridiculously fickle and capricious, bringing chaos and disorder everywhere he seemed to go, but, quite frankly, we loved that side of it in a world that was highly organized. In 2014, our little fan group spent days combing Twitter and the news for intel on the next gig and a couple of thousand of us speculatively queued up in Camden ALL DAY - cold and wet - for a possible gig. Turned out to be two gigs in one evening. Did Prince get on Twitter to tell anyone? No. Did he launch a website? No. He did a random press conference a few days before from Lianne La Havas’s tiny flat. Did he take Bitcoin? No, it was cash on the door. So much of what he did from about 1994 on was driven by a slightly paranoid suspicion that he was being ripped off somewhere along the line and only he should control how his work was enjoyed, leading him into weird situations with his fans, other bands and musicians (remember his cover of Radiohead’s Creep), and it only really eased up once he STOPPED trying to work with internet technology and realized his performance skills were his bread and butter. While I absolutely love and adore his music, I consider him to be a control freak and a terrible communicator outside of the studio who couldn’t handle reality, which is probably what helped kill him in the end, along with some dumb beliefs. I could honestly kick Larry Graham in the balls for that. For plenty of supporting source material, check out Kevin Smith’s incredible answer to a question about Prince, go look up the Hit & Run tour, and the vast swathes of terrible album covers that helped to bury so much of his later work - that and the fact that you couldn’t buy many of these albums in the shops anyway.

nostromo 3y ago
Thanks for a fun bit of insight to a fan base. For those curious about the Creep cover: > The most jaw-dropping moment of the night came near the end of the main set when he broke out Radiohead’s “Creep.” He had never played the song in concert before (or any other Radiohead songs for that matter), but across eight glorious minutes, he completely made it his own. It popped up on YouTube the next morning – with shots from many different angles – but the Prince camp is extremely vigilant with the Internet and had them all taken down. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke found this hysterical. “Really? He’s blocked it?” York asked an interviewer. “Surely we should block it. Hang on a moment. Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our song.” It was hard to argue with that, and it remains on YouTube even though most Prince material has been yanked for quite some time. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/flashback-prince-plays-a-jaw-dropping-cover-of-creep-at-coachella-223898/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/flashback-prin... The cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uu5vMLufNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uu5vMLufNA
- vr46 3y ago
  Thanks for links, really need to go listen to that tonight. Took years for Radiohead to play it again after originally getting sick of it, was stunned when I first heard them play it. There’s a band that REALLY understand things.
- toyg 3y ago
  Technically there are two set of rights: writing and performing. In this case Radiohead own the former, but not the latter. Prince would still have been in his legal rights to block reproductions of that particular performance, and I'm sure he was advised as such; he probably just made a call based on marketing instincts or as a favour to Yorke.
Fnoord 3y ago
My wife was manager at a pop podium, and she worked on a day where Prince might give a concert (it was a surprise concert while he was in The Netherlands, though the rumors were omnipresent). As a huge Prince fan, she was happy she was able to witness that concert, but it was chaos as the man had to be paid in cash. Also the tax had to be deducted on the go. They had to count 150k EUR manually (one ticket cost 100 EUR). This was in 2010. Without context of that quote of Prince, it is a useless statement. Because many internet pioneers such as Marleen Stikker (DDS) also see the internet as (partly) failed.

JohnFen 3y ago

> Now he did say the Internet was dead in 2010. And he was right. By 2010, most of what made the internet great was already dead and gone.