After home taping in all it’s guises, the P2P explosion, the poor music industry has to deal with this – Prince has ‘given away’ his latest album, apparently pocketing at least £250,000 from the deal with the Mail on Sunday. And what do we hear of this groundbreaking deal, where an artist has retained control of his ‘product’ and redefined how the public get to access it? Well, mostly the bleatings of commercial rip-off middlemen like HMV, who’s industry representatives whine…

The Entertainment Retailers Association, described plans to “dump” 3m Prince CDs onto breakfast tables on Sunday as wasteful given his albums do not sell in anywhere near those volumes.

The group has slammed Prince’s giveaway as devaluing music and taking record stores for granted.

Referring to MoS plans to distribute almost 3m copies on Sunday, the group said: “This is nearly twice the number of CDs sold by Prince in the UK over the past 13 years.”

Or they make veiled threats like…

“The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores,” said Quirk in reference to the 1990s when the star stopped using his name.

“It’s an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career,” he said.

An insult to record stores!? The same record stores who make far more per CD than the artist does? I can see why that would be insulting. Prince has decided that, instead of making £80,000 (on less than 80,000 sales of last album 3121) and handing far more to record stores and marketing men, he’ll take £250-500,000 from a newspaper and save his fans a lot of money. All while distributing 2.5 million copies! How insulting!

And the coverage he’s got for this album is astonishing. Reviews everywhere. Meeja luvvies falling over themselves to express an opinion. The Grauniad slighted by the fact that Prince chose a rag capable of selling 2.5m copies rather than go for ‘cool’ by shipping a fifth of that with the Observer.

And then there’s complete tripe like this, from the Scotsman. Headlined ‘a new threat to music’, there’s no need to dissect further. And all the comments on the piece see right through it. Fergus Sheppard, Media Correspondent, you are owned by the industry on which you comment, and irrelevant to the public to whom you correspond.

Prince, good on you.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 10:25 am and is filed under How To, Music.