Faster Forward;
Prince only the latest rock star to confess Internet cluelessness
"The internet's completely over.... The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated."
That pronouncement comes from an odd interview with enigmatic singer-songwriter Prince posted this morning by the Daily Mirror, a British newspaper.
In the story by Mirror writer Peter Willis, Minneapolis's gift to music explains that he will release his next album, 20TEN, only as a CD and only to Mirror readers, who will get a copy tucked into the tabloid next Saturday.
Prince cites business reasons, complaining that Apple's iTunes and other online stores "won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it." But he also seems to have a broader objection to the whole concept of digital sales: "Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."
Try not to read that as: You dang Internet, get off my lawn!
Now, Prince has his own reasons for distrusting the music business in general. Over his decades in pop life, he's had more than one strange relationship with record labels--especially after 1999, when Internet distribution became a hot thing in the industry. Yet another controversy over his album-release strategy shouldn't exactly have people delirious with disbelief.
(So you know, I own a few Prince CDs myself.)
But the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince does have company in forgetting that ignoring the Internet will simply cede the online market to other distribution channels--as in, the unlicensed and illegal kind that don't yield them any return, but which many people will resort to when they're not given a legal alternative online.
The Beatles are the best-known members of this clueless club; the Fab Four's surviving members and their inept management seem determined to wait until everybody with a computer has already downloaded their entire catalogue from one file-sharing system or another before they will deign to make it available on iTunes, Amazon's MP3 store or any other online outlet.
But there are others. Metal bands AC/DC and Def Leppard remain absent from iTunes and Amazon (although the former group was available on Microsoft's long-since-shuttered MSN Music store, an ill-chosen exclusive deal that somehow didn't get the Australian rockers' management fired). The vast majority of Garth Brooks and Kid Rock's work remains missing from iTunes and Amazon. And there are many lesser-known groups--for instance, the Connells--with out-of-print albums that have been stranded offline.
What other bands are you waiting to see arrive in this century? When do you think all of these holdouts will grace the Web with their presence? And how long do you think it will take for Prince's latest to show up in the usual unauthorized channels online?
There seems to be an assumption, not that they may choose to go digital, but they MUST go digital. Whether they do or not doesn't bother me, I don't have an iwha'jigga-migger, shoot right now I don't even have any speakers hooked up to the PC. I more than happy to buy the disk of plastic, that used to be the disk of vinyl, and put it in the mechanical player, after I feed the squirrel.
