Slave Trade - Prince Documentary

in the mid-90s reports began to surface that prints one of the world's most successful recording artists had fallen into serious dispute with his record label claiming that his art had been taken hostage by merciless corporate interests prince announced that he was at war for the music business and that the whole industry needed to be torn down and reorganized I think like most artists they don't really investigate until it's happening to that and I think that's pretty much what Prince found himself doing is examining more closely like whoa how does this work Prince is astute and he likes to read and share ideas so the more he got into the literature about the music business the more upset he got you know and how it's designed I mean it's it's it's systemic it's that's what it does if you exploit an artist and they get paid a mere pittance compared to what you make initially interpreted by the public as an obscure contractual disagreement the dispute proved to be the opening installment in the remaking of the music business at the close of the millennium fired by his fight with Warner Brothers Prince set out to articulate new concepts in the making and selling of music at a time when the digital age was threatening to bring the existing order to its knees in the eighties Prince revolutionized music reinvented the Minneapolis sound and he sort of brought a whole new style of music and how many fusion music white and black funk and rock and everything into one big thing that was just Prince that was he took the way music sounded to a whole new level in the 90s when his music was less revolutionary he revolutionized the business and revolutionized the music industry and time after time what he does has vision and foresight and is ahead of its time and it turns out that not only could he do that musically he did it with business as well yet he's not gonna get the credit for that at the time the significance of princes message was largely overlooked his behavior was received as surreal and eccentric by a world that was yet to discern the forces of change that were gathering on the horizon routinely dismissed as a spoilt clownish sideshow Prince's profile suffered badly and his new work was increasingly ignored but when the change arrived it became clear that Prince had been a visionary and he found himself restored to prominence as a leading figure in the modern landscape of art and music he was just out of sync at that time his time had passed and he had to wait for it to come around again which it inevitably did by the time it came around again it's like now he's comfortable with being a legend playing the music that he makes not trying to be a hip-hop artist or this or that and just embracing who he is and what his gifts are and that the audience was there for him to the point where he tours more successfully today than he did at his peak so without even selling any records he sells more tickets than he did with Purple Rain go figure [Music] he stepped out on faith by even putting out record independently and doing things like selling through the newspaper which is why he's gotten a lot of flack from those the powers that be they don't appreciate that because then that stimulates the minds of people who are coming up and as you see even the younger generations now it's just academic now this is what they do so yes it has helped him and whether he gets all the credit now or you know twenty or fifty or hundred years from now he will go down in history as one who did something that was revolutionary [Music] [Applause] [Music] in the summer of 1992 prince entered into negotiations with Warner Brothers over a new recording contract [Music] Prince had first been signed by warner's as the talented but raw teenager back in 1977 but over the course of his tenure at the label his status as an artist had clearly changed during the period of his ascent the music industry had been drawing ever escalating mind-bending profits and Prince had noted that the other stars in the business including the marquee names at Warner's were now being paid big money Madonna is one of their artists REM become a Warner Brothers artist and these artists are having huge hits and signing big deals you reach a point in the 90s where Madonna and Michael Jackson have signed very very big deals with their record companies thirty million dollars 60 million dollar deals and Prince is angry because Prince sees himself as a greater artist than Michael Jackson or Madonna and arguably he's right unlike Michael Jackson and Madonna you can leave Prince by himself in the studio and he will walk out with a hit record he's built his own studio he is a self-contained world he can churn out hit records so Prince wants to be paid a lot of money he wanted the headline to be hundred million dollar deal and he became so fixated on waking up to see that headline in the newspapers that I could argue he didn't care how he got it at least so it seemed 100 million dollars reflected the general self-confidence of the music business at the turn of the decade during the 1970s as rock-and-roll matured the appeal of black music expanded and the public appetite for their product proved insatiable the major labels have perceived an opportunity to generate enormous sums of money in the 1980s they had consolidated and the commercial face of music changed radically the record companies that had started life as the fiefdom zuv wealthy music enthusiasts and charismatic impresarios had transfigured into enormous corporate concerns multinational entertainment conglomerate staffed by sharp executives with one eye on stock prices and the other on an apparently limitless torrent of revenue artists profiles became ever larger with MTV and Stadium tours amplifying their cultural presence and global reach of the superstar acts that were made in the 80s Prince was arguably rivaled only by Michael Jackson and Madonna in terms of Fame and significance as a solo performer he had carried that level of standing into the early 90s and by the time that his contract fell due for renewal Prince was once again busy at the top of the charts with 1991's diamonds and pearls by the early 90s Prince had more or less come out of the 80s a sort of one of the biggest stars of that decade and he made himself the first artist since the Beatles told simultaneously number-one single album and film position for when doves cry Abba rain although his sounds had slightly deteriorated since that period he continued to release a string of albums no beach more artistically questing than the last and sort of he remained a massive massive name is sort of as the 80s came to a close he he started to slip a little bit with graffiti bridge for instance which is kind of a follow-up to Purple Rain is a terrible terrible film that he made that sort of made him look like some of his artistic decisions will maybe not the best that he was making as a deck he came to a close but he was had a phenomenal success with a Batman soundtrack so he ended the decade kind of in a weird position where on one hand yes some of his ideas weren't proven the subcircuit successful as older ones and on the other hand he was still making massive selling albums the diamonds and pearls album that came after graffiti bridge had none of the concept you know none of the storyline it was just an album a collection of songs that had six singles off the back of it it was a massive seller thought about six million or something like that and so when he entered contract negotiations Warner's he was actually in a bit of a high again you getting ready to go into contract renegotiation it certainly benefited him to have a more commercial successful record and diamonds and pearls gave him that right though as an artist Prince may have had few peers from Warner's perspective the business case was perhaps not as compelling the label had historically been incredibly supportive of a musician who was often idiosyncratic in his Worth and activity at times willfully difficult under the stewardship of record executives Moe Austin and Lenny Waronker Warner Brothers had established a reputation as one of the most artist friendly labels in the industry Austin and Warren Kurt started out in the 1960s and retained some of the idealism of that era their ethos was one of allowing musicians the space to develop and express their creativity over the long term free from commercial pressure for the demand for instant success Prince had enjoyed the freedom to pursue the full spectrum of projects that caught his news without oversight the label had assented to his desire to be self-directed and to work without a producer they had backed his forays into filmmaking and they had agreed to invest in setting up his own label Paisley Park records although prince had reciprocated by delivering hits and prestige he was prone to taking unpredictable turns including withdrawing albums prior to release refusing to do press interviews and on one occasion demanding that Warner's issue his work unpromoted decisions that struck the label as being nothing short of sabotage when measured against the other big-name acts of the era in hard-nosed financial terms Prince was not necessarily a safe bet I wouldn't have thought the prince was strictly speaking as bankable as Madonna and Michael Jackson these guys are selling phenomenal records every time they put something yeah and as you can see through Prince's sales throughout the late eighties his sales had been slipping as the decade came to an end his arms were sort of more high concept pieces like the love sexy kind of confused as many people as man people have bought it he was making strange business decisions by the end of the 80s particularly the lovesexy tour to sort of tour in Europe ignore the US market and he did the same a sign of the times not make so much money as home go to his European fan base whereas the other guys had a more worldwide touring album selling set up the problem they were having with Prince was that he was producing too many records too quickly faster than their promotion and marketing machine could really digest faster than the marketplace and the media could digest we were in an era where most artists would release records anywhere from between two and three years apart and he arguably could have had two records a year if he had wanted to and he did want to because he was he was of the mind that a record was like a newspaper when it was finished it was of it it was of that time and I finished this song last night in the studio I want people to hear it today it's relevant to today I produced it today it's about how I feel today people should hear it today and of course the legitimate argument was that radio wasn't prepared to accept that much product for many artists either and as a result it made it difficult for the label to promote it so that there really was a legitimate argument to space things out it just didn't fit him as an artist and when the parties eventually settled around a table to discuss the terms of a new deal both had priorities that they were keen to achieve for prints it was the figure stamped across the contract 100 million dollars to confirm him as the most valuable artist in the business he got his wish when negotiations concluded statements were released to the press announcing that prince had resigned with Warner Brothers in the biggest deal of all time he and I actually had some differences about how crucial that headline really was because when you get into the nuts and bolts of what makes a deal worth that kind of money you know the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away there's gonna be something in those negotiations in the fine print that you may wake up one morning and not really like once you get past the headline and that was my argument so I approached it pretty cautiously because I realized he really really had an astoundingly supportive you could even say indulgent arrangement with Warner's they were clearly losing a ton of money and Paisley parked the label because it was not cross-collateralized with his royalties all the lofts on Paisley Park was a write-off didn't come out of Prince's pocket which is part of the reason why he didn't care and could keep turning out these these kind of self-indulgent projects clearly Warner's wanted to put a stop to that but at the same time how do you stop that how do you do that without annoying the artist that you desperately want to keep the artist who as a Warner Brothers artist is worth so much not just in terms of sales but in terms of the cachet because when you have an artist like Prince it's attractive to signing newer artists I mean he's a flag waver for you as a brand name so they were in a bind where they were looking for any means with which to cut their losses on Paisley Park the label without doing something that would affect their relationship with him is of entity and inadvertently he gave them that out he gave them the means that they needed by saying I want this hundred million dollar deal I'm fixated on my on the advances I get from my records that's really the most important thing to me and everything else be damned at the end of the day prints came out with a deal they gave him a 20 percent royalty rate and he was promised ten million dollars on every new album providing the previous album sold five million copies so Prince came out of the business meeting trumpeting that he'd had this great 100 million dollar deal that he just signed Warner Brothers now as promised those reports on popular culture when RCA Records signed Elvis Presley back in 1956 they paid $35,000 unheard of at the time here's an unheard-of figure for our times one hundred million dollars that's the deal Prince cut with Warner Brothers Records a 10 million advance 10min 2 million each for 6 albums the rest in royalties more than Michael Jackson more than Madonna and Prince gets a title corporate vice president Madonna is worth 60 million his is worth a hundred million it's not it's actually not there are articles immediately at that moment in the press saying it's worth up to a hundred million dollars I know these people working with prints are saying it's a hundred million dollar deal but it's only worth a hundred million if each one of his next five records sells 5 million copies now in the 90s that seemed possible today of course it seems impossible and even then it seemed only possible not probable enough to watch a new album on a tour right now is Prince who's upcoming LP diamonds and pearls will unveil his latest bad stop by his label one of others records last week to give staffers a sneak preview of upcoming diamonds and pearls album I'm telling you this is pearl any contract were an artist guarantees that they're going to sell 5 million copies of anything is risky to say the least but Prince was in a very good position to do that at the time creatively it's hard to say the Muse is an unreliable thing and even though he was enormous ly successful if not necessarily as innovative as he had been in the past he had he'd had huge career commercial success with diamonds and pearls and he seemed poised to continue it diamonds and pearls had sold 5.8 million copies 5.8 not ten not twelve and that six it had sold 5.8 million copies so he had to keep at that level and generally speaking you don't top yourself a reasonable expectation is you're gonna sell about 30% less 30% less at 5.8 would be under 5 million therefore he's not going to get his hundred million dollars in point of fact he's probably gonna end up owning the record company money because all that money is well in advance it's a loan and it doesn't take prints long to realize this as to whether the deal worked out which is everybody's questioned one very simple answer year and a half later he had slave on his face with his new deal secured Prince refocused his attention on music though the terms of his agreement now set a high bar for the commercial performance of any upcoming releases Prince had assembled a band the new Power Generation to whom he had given Co billing on diamonds and pearls and it moved away from being a solo electronically driven artist to working more collaboratively within a traditional group set up diamonds and pearls in its accompanying tour have been enormous ly successful and a follow-up record was almost complete before the Inc had dried on the Contra Warners keen to maintain momentum and push into the 90s with a new sound the band worked intensively in the studio for what would become popularly known as love symbol after the unpronounceable symbol that took the place of a title we were really really tight after the Diamonds of pearls tour and that album so we were just on fire we were you know the band was just hype you know ready to go in the studio ready to record you know I mean it was just a fantastic position at that time it was a very positive environment with the band and with Prince I think he was happy with the singles that were being chosen the sound of the new Power Generation I think was much more commercial than what Prince was doing prior to more organic I think unless electronically driven than a lot of Prince's work around that time maybe more in the tradition of soul music some things diamonds and pearls and cream is kind of kind of that's a lot of it was there was a throwback but there was a modern element to but I think it's what made that period of afarensis catalog stand out is that he leaned much more on the ensemble I think he wanted to do something that was a little out of the box because you and diamonds and prose alot it was commercial it's pretty commercial actually I mean it was like kind of asymmetrical but very well done album but it was a lot more commercial than things he had done I think he wanted to do something else something you know that was more expressive of his creative side you know he always tries different styles of music you know we grew up together as kids you know we used to jam and play all night as kids you know funky you know cuz I mean we had all the all the great funk records at that time you know so that's in his DNA I mean that's just something that's gonna come out anyway but I think once we had that particular end that band MGP it was that was just a whole nother monster that whole band was just funky as all get-out it was just a great band new power generation taking control introducing mighty podium Koki J Damon see the lineup of the new Power Generation included a rapper Toni M who featured prominently on the love symbol album he's Prince attempted to address the changes sweeping popular music during the late 80s and early 90s the coming of hip hop had made a major impact on black music and culture in particular the funk and soul jams of princes generation was subject to a wholesale clear out as rap became all-conquering but by the early 90s hip-hop itself was beginning to evolve and the party records political polemics and social commentaries of its formative years had given way to the aggressive nihilistic dystopias of gangsta rap a world away from prince's traditional frame of reference love symbol made a conscious effort to address the zeitgeist but came up short alongside a narrative concept and spoken word segues of confused audiences the album's melange of funk soul and R&B included an attempt to incorporate rap most notably with the singles sexy MF and my name is Prince both tracks charted poorly in the US placing at number 66 and 36 respectively coming after the recent hits from diamonds and pearls it represented a drastic decline in fortunes as for Prince's fabled $100,000,000 it had evaporated released in October 1992 loved symbols struggled to achieve 1 million sales far short of the minimum five million required to secure his advance from Warner's the new era had got off to a shaky start those singles my name is Prince and sexy and we're not they were critical successes but I think that when you establish a wide audience and then you start you know getting more explicit once you're on a certain type of exploration some people are going to be turned off you know but I think as an artist you have to stay excited about what it is you're doing and you know so my mama probably didn't buy that love symbol album but that's alright you know if somebody did he went looking at the record trends and what the sales were gonna be and all that I mean everybody wants to get rings I'm not saying he didn't want to hit but he wanted to do what was in his heart he wanna do music that was coming I was hired he's not gonna go I want to do diamonds or pearls to the three ladies are you know what I mean it's what's you know coming through him Prince and the new power generation take control act one [Music] prints look to give love symbol a boost by going out on his first US tour in five years commencing in March 93 act one took part of the concept behind the album a love story centered on his future wife might a Garcia and reimagined it as a theatrical live performance with the second set dedicated to the hits and the shows staged in small intimate venues the tour proved popular and tickets moved far oh it was sore doubt it at that time we were just we were a polished and well oiled machine at that point so we could turn the corner you know and he want to do something a little more theatrical for the show which was cool cuz it was more like a theater tour it was groundbreaking in a lot of ways you know Prince would show us the like the reviews in the reviews were stunning they were incredible everywhere we went they've sold out and the band was on fire and it was just we just had a great time you know I'm if their machine can't keep up with us what are we supposed to what's he supposed to do you know he got to get his music out I mean within reason if the material is good it should be marketed it should be put out that she did video store it they should be able to go on tour and they shouldn't be able to have support and you know do the things that they're supposed to do and have a successful record that the company gets paid they get paid well the situation with Warner Brothers with his audience as we were on tour I think Trench was just trying to left in the end to his world to a certain degree to let him know let them know what he was going through it was a monologue mostly in them you know he says it says something about Warner Brothers and there's a lot of booing in the audience and one night I remember they started chanting like ya f Warner Brothers and Prince just kind of turned around with a mic and he was kind of crack it up he just get on stage and berate his record label for more or less not letting him do what he wanted which kind of also having just signed what he was proclaiming was a hundred million dollar deal didn't really shine with you know the poor artists who had been held back by his record label because he just boasted having this great deal where his record label were giving him everything he wanted things were complicated at Warner Brothers at the time there was a very big I called it the civil war happening I worked at two different Warner labels during those years there was a lot of battling going on at the top his deal was seen as unfair or overly generous by allowing the other artists there and again it comes back to ownership for him I don't think he was ever able to accept the fact he didn't own his music he didn't feel as loved by the label anymore which is strange because it was the same people he had been dealing with initially anyway for his entire career and once those people were gone once mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker stepped away and had to answer to new bosses themselves things went from bad to worse and he started submitting albums that were not only uncommital I would say at moments they were kind of a aníbal and he was clearly not bringing his a-list material to them and he started putting he started putting out albums so quickly that in order to get out of his contract that I think they may have even threatened legal action because he was he was just putting out now trying to put out an album every six months with the parties at an impasse the argument quickly turned bitter in the summer of 93 print presented Warner's with a new power generation album Gold [ __ ] side projects and collaborations with both protegees and other artists have been a long-standing feature of prince's work enabling him to make musical excursions and explore artistic concepts without the expectations attached to his core brand but when golf distributing through a telephone order service and merchandise stores at his shows this foray into independence in turn provoked the ire of Warner Brothers who dimly viewed it as a naked breach of contract by this point they wanted to release the best of sort of consolidate his career a little bit make sure they made a lot of money out of this you know the Prince hits album sort of thing and prints just keep bringing them new albums and new material and he had another side project album Gold [ __ ] which was his new power generation album fronted by Tony M the terrible rapper this was never going to sell but Prince wanted want us to release it rap / soul record you know with real instruments and also was a showcase for for Tony for Tony m to do his thing you know it's very much in the tradition of like blaxploitation films a lot of it you know I think that we had like a Deuce and a quarter on the front of the record like we're all kind of we were in California you know posing all thuggish ruggish you know look like we were you know some kind of gang but uh it was kind of a just a throwback it was we had worked on these tracks and Prince had been driving around listened to doing he's just like I really like this you know let's put it out those albums were for him to do because we could step out of the box and we could do a totally different sound from what Prince was doing you know but there were still elements of that sound is still tied it together and I think at that time does that sound for me was that was some of the fun and stuff we ever did I thought it will [ __ ] yeah and you know it's you know these things happen you know and you just have to move on to the next thing you know and that was heartbreaking you know but you move on that was kind of in the same creative territory as another thing we worked on called the Undertaker and I think this was also where Prince began to realize that he wasn't legally able to circumvent the system something happened with the Undertaker like he wanted to just press like a thousand copies and just just give it to friends and you know could concerned apart and somebody Warner Brothers you can't do that honky tonk woman and you know there was some originals on it but I mean it was very carefully it was a jam session with me and Sonny and Prince you know then in the middle of the night it was like this is cool let's let's do you know I want to get this out to some people and you know Warner Brothers intervenes that no you can't do that anything you release you know has got to go through us feeling trapped and that his art and identity had been taken hostage by a cynical autocratic and self-serving corporation prince made one of the most drastic and infamous moves of his career he stopped being Prince on June the 7th 1993 Prince announced that he had changed his name to the unpronounceable glyph from the love symbol album that he would no longer turn in any new material to Warner Brothers and that his contractual obligations would be met by releasing old songs from the vault his core fan base remained supportive but the wider public were perplexed though his PR team lofted Lee asked that he be called the artist he was more commonly referred to as the artist formerly known as Prince and universally mocked by a media industry that was sure he had finally vacated his senses the artist formerly known as Prince has one of the most controversial and most mysterious figures in rock is even asked to be referred to only as a symbol but for clarity in this story we'll call him Prince that extraordinary moment where Prince changes his name to the symbol a symbol that nobody knew how to print Warner Brothers actually was on the hook to produce like little round disks full of the software to hand out to people at magazines so you could reprint Prince's name the way he wanted it printed crazy my name is very spiritual to me has a great deal of spiritual meaning and one day maybe I'll hear a sound that will best give me the feeling of what it's supposed to be but for right now I just go by the look of it at that moment his complaint is that Warner's isn't giving him ownership of his intellectual property that's the way we would phrase it today it becomes an intellectual property battle I made this music why don't I own it why don't I own my Master's weight why don't I own my publishing all things that Prince continues to be obsessed with to this day and yet at that time these were things that you know musicians didn't talk about that much now not that unusual to find either an indie musician talking about why I want to stay in an indie label because I want to own my work or to find someone a veteran artist saying I'm suing my record company to get back my rights because under copyright law and then it just becomes a lecture but at that time we weren't really used to artists making these complaints it seemed like belly aching I mean it seemed like someone who's famous and rich planning that he wasn't rich enough the name changed you could look at a lot of different ways I mean the defense the undeniable fact is that the name change made him kind of a buffoon it certainly became the subject matter of talk show jokes and so on he had to see that happen to coming I can't imagine he didn't that's right what do you call him well he got a hold up this thing what do you call this right here did I call him Prince oh no yeah yeah the whole thing because he's the artist a bomb an Lord the dispute in the name change were unquestionably damaging to Prince especially the name change I think I'll call him Prince all right why don't you just get a cabin and go home all right negative his behavior had been strange his public behavior had been strange in a lot of ways leading up to it and when you do something like change your name to an unpronounceable symbol sure it's an interesting publicity stunt but if you're at a news organization let alone a record company okay when you're talking about the artist name the amount of production work that goes into simply rendering that is is a whole other thing to say nothing of the public perception of what it says about that person now he may have had his reasonably defensible legal legal and moral reasons for wanting to do that you know saying you know Prince's is an is a corporate entity separate from me the actual person my name is it doesn't endear you to people and I just remember a headline I think it was from the for the New Musical Express at the time and it said my name is and the subtitle was and I am bonkers [Applause] George [Music] [Applause] [Applause] death [Music] having proclaimed that it would no longer submit records to Warner Brothers but yet still under contract Prince found himself in a bind the genesis of his argument with the label had been his prolific output yet any new work would not now reach the public ear though he have picked a fight with his pay masters over releasing his work Prince was confronted by the reality that he may have thrust his whole career into limbo here was a man who in the late 70s negotiated not to have a producer he had an executive producer on his first down but he wouldn't have an actual producer on it and that was you know his first battle with Warner Brothers he'd won his second battle was dirty mind when he went to release a really raw stripped-down album Warner Brothers said that he needs to write overdubs kind of clean it up a bit but no it came out as dirty mind this this record that Warner Brothers didn't expect it was more New Wave and R&B later on 1999 comes out as a double album that's another argument the Prince is one with them and I think that you see a succession of Prince getting his own way that when he enters the early 90s he kind of assumes that you know he's going to still get his own way and you can kind of see why you would but also there's certainly a touch of hubris in what he was doing at the time he kind of couldn't really see that the quality of work wasn't necessarily there he was more convinced that people just accept what he had to give them he wasn't really questioning himself or his artistic or quod he control of the time we were working on new music that was not intended to be released by one of us this Prince didn't want some material actually did come out I mean it all came out eventually but at the time we were working on a collection of songs that included stuff that was on come and stuff that ended up being on the gold experiences for a while we were Hurst all of it without knowing which album was coming out next what was the sequence how the songs are gonna be separated between the two and I don't think Prince had figured out a way yet to sidestep Warner Brothers and do it on his own the dispute with Warner Brothers had a direct effect on our working environment and the fact that you know Prince would basically be talking somebody at Warner Brothers or his lawyer and we come in for rehearsal and we get called up into his office and he needed to vent he needed to explain you know himself for his own sanity I'm sure he needed somebody to bounce these ideas off and talk to him so we'd get up there he'd be you know visibly upset and you know what mo Ostin said to me you know and so I think his his consciousness was inundated from there artists and began to dismantle the empire that Prince had managed to build during his years at the top Paisley Park records his own label and vehicle for many of his side projects functioned as a joint venture with Warner's underwriting distribution and marketing although some of the product emanating from Paisley Park had been widely derided as indulgences for Prince's latest girlfriend there were also legends of times past on the roster including George Clinton with Mavis Staples Warner's however were sure that the whole enterprise was a none commercial folly tolerated as a favor to an artist who repaid them with insults in February 1994 they pulled the plug on Paisley Park withdrawing their distribution deal and sinking the business they certainly were looking to needle Prince and you know withdraw their support from something but he obviously still wanted to keep it going he still had things that he wanted to release side projects he wanted to release and I think and withdrawing their support from that it was a bit of a stab at you know Prince she was going out saying Warner's aren't letting me do what I want where they said we were going to do that then we're going to show you we're not going to let you do a 1 and you can't have the money to carry on doing it when Prince started playable in the 80s he had so many side projects and so much extra material that he could give away it was kind of seen as an extension of the Prince world in a way he had groups at the time he had scenery he had vanity 6 and later had Apollonia 6 these are side projects that he just seemed to be able to have enough material for his own work for their work odd songs Manic Monday went on to the you so it could go into the Paisley Park label dressed in what they were bringing him it also became quite clear as time went on I think that Prince was kind of also interested in mostly producing albums by girlfriends kind of made Paisley Park a bit of a laughingstock because the quality from princess material wasn't there certainly the quality in the artist wasn't there and so he ended up really asking Warner Brothers to bankroll a vanity label it just as an extension of his playground rather than an actual working functioning label and again I think our meets has gone on record as saying you know he had a tough time making Warner Brothers take Paisley Park seriously when Paisley Park didn't want to be taken seriously itself everybody was frustrated with Paisley Park the label simply because and simply because the records hadn't been it had not been a successful label Warner's was saying because that it was because Prince wasn't accepting his responsibilities as an A&R person as a label chief he wasn't producing the kind of product that was contemporarily competitive his position was my product is what it is and it's your job to market and promote it and you're failing me there there was both sides were right it was a constant struggle to get any kind of major attention from the promotion and marketing people at Warner's they were they wanted to be supportive but they didn't really believe in the product the fact is we were giving them what what goes in the industry called difficult records meaning they weren't easy to promote and market to radio which at that time was the only way you knew how to promote a record was to go to radio they kind of had their heads in the sand as to any kind of of alternative means of promoting and marketing which was always a source of frustration to artists and producers and to me as a label head it was as well because I said you know we've got some viable product here that people who find it really liked it it has a place in the market somewhere so how do we get it to that place and if we have to bypass the normal route of going directly to urban radio or pop radio whatever these formats are then isn't it our job to figure out the detour in order to reach that public but the labels just weren't prepared to do that because they were on kind of automatic pilot they had enough product to feed the Machine so they didn't have either the time or the energy to do anything that was the least bit creative or off-center Prince's frustration with the complacency of the music business coupled with his immediate need to find a way out of the stalemate with Warner's gave him a radical idea he devised a plan to release a single independently and promoted himself via his new n PG Records imprint incredibly Warner's granted him leave to do so and on February the 14th 1994 the most beautiful girl in the world was issued globally with distribution support from the small independent label Bell mark the litmus test was the most beautiful girl in the world but the one single out got the money behind it the promotion maxi-single you know we did the the did the whole world on that song with the most beautiful girl in the world they finally kind of gave him a chance to do that I think they were fed up of the nagging and I kind of think that they wanted it to fail they if they did believe that much in the Sun we probably would have just taken it for themselves so what Prince did he went off on his newly launched mpg record label he plowed two million dollars into financing and promoting the song and had this great worldwide campaign he really created this great hype around the song so that by the time was ready to come out this was a really big deal it was unusual because I can't ever remember a superstar single being available outside of the normal distribution channels it was harder to find than a lot of the other than you know your average releases were and there was a mail-order campaign about it at the time and it was fairly groundbreaking in terms of what he was later to do sometimes successfully sometimes not in his career he's always been looking for ways to go outside of the major label model all of the stuff that happens in the 90s you look back on it and you think pioneer this guy is a pioneer at the time what Warner's was was you want to release your music yourself you think you know better than we do and by the way there had been arguments between them about what to put out as singles before this and generally Warner's was correct and prints was not and so what Warner's is saying is you want to do this yourself go right ahead it's gonna cost you a lot of money you'll see you need us you don't really understand radio promotion cost a lot of money you'll see you need us as it turned out he has a hit with a big sappy ballad [Music] [Applause] [Music] I think it deserved to go to number one is his first number one in the UK he proved at least to himself that he could still make hits and it also allowed him certainly it also convinced him to believe that he had sound business sense that he could do this on his own and I think Warner Brothers letting him do it in a way slightly backfired on them because it kind of gave Prince all the ammunition he needed to be able to say I can do this on my own [Music] that was an incredible success well that's one song you know and that's a an engineered effort and that was Prince's proof to Warner Brothers you know this can be done you know you guys are cramping my style and keeping me from you know being a successful my music as I can actually be so you know it was a good thing it was a bad thing because if prince has shown that he's correcting his revelation you can't stop it again this is a prescient move at the time it just seemed a little weird and it would get weirder every step along the way after this things get stranger and stranger and actually more difficult although the most beautiful girl in the world had been a global hit it was not a magic bullet and the wider problems persisted Prince had recently suggested to the label that he would submit two new albums come and the gold experienced to be released on the same day which would put them in competition with each other in the marketplace unsurprisingly Warner's rebuffed the whole plan as a mad exercise in self immolation and insisted that he work on improving come when it was released in August Prince declined to engage in any promotion describing the album as old material from a dead artist what's interesting is that Prince initially wanted to have come come out on the same day as the gold experienced album thereby pitting the two sort of brands the prince and the symbol brand against each other to sort of see which won't be successful and you could kind of assume the prince was open that the gold experience would be the more successful album it's certainly the one that he was promoting at the time and the one that he was playing the songs from live and so it's kind of a weird sort of murky period and in Prince's career people didn't like this record not because it's a bad record it's actually a great record it's a fantastic Prince records listen to it now it's great but it's an album of George Clinton James Brown Avant funk it's not a pop album whatsoever and people did not know what to make of that record critics who want Prince to create pop songs disliked it somewhat intensely and very much wrongly fans simply didn't know what to make of it you comes a funny record it's a very odd is a very muddled album and it's certainly one of the more interesting of his nineties though I wouldn't say it's an out-and-out classic it's bookended by these kind of nonsense songs the title track and orgasm and from the very title as you kind of know what's going on with them you get a few sort of dance tracks and loosen pheromone that in the context of the times doesn't quite work when they came out but sort of in retrospect they're kind of dated a bit better than some of those other materials so weird it allowed them listen to it now incredible holds up as good as a Black Album sure sometimes better absolutely then just seem like wow he'll do anything to get out of this record contract the problem is that it gets caught up in the whole Warner Brothers battle then you have Prince by now what he's saying is starting to overshadow the music anyway and he's very pointedly has on the artwork the birth date of Prince 1958 and the death date of Prince on there as well the year the album came out and so Prince obviously sees it as a record that's kind of closing a chapter for him you the rolling stone assessment have come isn't fair because it's a good record and yet it's not inaccurate it was another installment in a spectacular career derailment again no one could see where this was going it looked as though one of the greatest pop geniuses had renounced pop it looked as though the person who'd signed the biggest label deal in history had renounced his label all of this didn't quite make sense we've come in stores prints resumed negotiations with the label over the fate of the gold experience and the battle reached its nadir unable to find common ground Warner's officially released the black album an extensively bootleg record that prince had shelved in 1987 blows were traded in the press with both sides taking out mudslinging advertisements in Billboard magazine Prince claimed that the gold experience was being deliberately suppressed by the label and insisted that he had a moral right to ownership of his masters including his back catalogue in the early weeks of 1995 he began to appear in public with the word slave slashed across his face I'm privy to a conversation that he had with more Austin around the time of the gold expense he mentioned the gold experience as a record he wanted to put out we had two begun working on this record yet it was just I think we had been talking about and he got a phone call he said he said he talked to mo Ostin on the phone and more Austin was like he's talked about other business and then Austin said okay well as soon as you get that gold experience record finish you know send it right on you know and it will do what we know you know well we'll do what we do and Prince said I I haven't even started on it yet I'm just conceiving it in my brain and most like well yeah either way it's our so I think Prince at that point made an epiphany that this company thinks that they own the ideas that are in my head I haven't even begun to put anything on tape and they're already talking about what they're gonna do with so I think that was really that was the the point at which Prince realized I can't do this anymore and he walks into rehearsal he's that's written on his face and you know he's like this is it I'm here with the new power generation and the artist formerly known as Prince as a member of the band he's agreed to his first television interview in over a decade but is refusing to answer any questions now the press keeps talking about the dispute with your record company is there a dispute there I mean it seems that's what's driven you out of America that's what that's what's made you change your name to an unpronounceable symbol he changed his name because his spirit told him to a spirit yes good and you feel freer now that you can't be addressed a little bit do you seem to be fighting for freedom what is it exactly that you want to be free from when you're talking about your record company is there something that you want to own is there something that you want to be able to edit is there something that you want to be able to say that you can't maybe might take it tell me what do you want to own your own masters No and your job can you leave it if you want to yeah I can you can't well in the record industry you can't but can't you just stop performing yeah you can but you know yeah it doesn't gives us the firm yeah you can't own your masters you could only make you know pennies on the dollar meanwhile other people are you know or just they got fat mattresses and they keep shoveling money that they've made from your ingenuity you know that you're never gonna see I don't think he only perceived his deal as unfair I think it was a general feeling about the business that it's just unfair maybe if he had come at it a little more everyman I suppose and explained himself a little more clearly he may have gotten more sympathy when things have changed probably not because he was really the first person taking this issue on at that level it's a business point that's become a culture point because of everything that's happened since but they're in the middle of the 90s for an average music fan it all seemed really weird it's like why do I care turns out we would all end up caring about this stuff but we didn't know at the time so I think people were aware that things were changing but I don't think they had any awareness of what was to come Warner Brothers said something and he there was a rebuttal this all went on the Billboard magazine for you know a month or better and I was like wow this is getting heated up man this is getting turned up like who knows what's gonna happen I remember then like listen I don't know what's gonna happen you know they might try to send somebody you know somebody needs to know where the vaults at and how to get the key cuz you know who knows I mean the big business is dirty prince was by now firmly resolved that he could not work within the context of the established music industry that he would have to find alternative means of producing and marketing his art he vented his feelings on a second new power generation album Exodus a collection of agitprop funk jams with lead vocals taken by bassist Sonny T rejected by Warner's Prince released Exodus through NPR in total disregard of his contract terms well you know when we grew up we both had our own bands would be both were singers so it's really strange that he you know as we grew up and yet we both were in the same band he you know he knows I've been singing for years and stuff so he's always like asked me to do something to sing you know he's like okay would you say on his record I'm like yeah so that's how that came about [Music] [Music] from what I could tell prince was like let's do a record on sunny why not you know it started out harmless enough but it quickly grew into a situation where sunny did my opinion was the mouthpiece for Prince you know and a lot of ideas for instance having at the time I mean the exes has begun man that is that is a a a verbal beatdown if I remember correctly I haven't listened to it in years but I remember the first time hearing it after principal his vocals on and everything came together I was like wow he has managed to channel his anger into a very specific phrases and the syntax was so creative and spot-on you know it was its whoever it was directed that specifically should have been really ashamed of themselves you have just accessed the beautiful experience welcome to the dawn [Music] exhausted by the ongoing conflict and collateral damage to their brand Warners finally agreed to release the gold experience in September 1995 on the condition that Prince stopped defaming them in public the album was warmly received and Randi praised as prince's best work in years it was clear from sales figures however that the dispute had taken a toll on his mainstream popularity a few months later the whole unhappy episode concluded as the parties agreed terms to end their relationship you know enough was enough and I think Warner's realized that this wasn't going to end and less yeah ironically Prince kind of gets his way again yeah sort of unconditionally what they ended up coming up with there was an agreement that the gold experienced would come out as a joint Warner Brothers npg release and then Prince would owe them two more albums from the vault and those would be those are going to be chaos and disorder and the vault odd friends for sale and needs to be sort of collection of old material they had to have on them and it stands very pointedly originally intended for private use only on the artwork and things like that that would kind of show both feelings Prince had for these things they were there they were kind of you take these and now neat piano and I think they were quite happy to get prints off their back by that point the public battle between Prince and Warner Brothers didn't go well for anyone it hurt Prince's career enormous Lee because people felt he was entitled and it Warner brother statements just made them seem even more money-grubbing grubbing than labels usually seem which they seldom don't it hurt both of them especially in light of the gold experience album which was the best album Prince had made certainly since diamonds and pearls and possibly even before that and it was delayed for a year it came out in 1995 there are at least two lyrics on the album that spoke about 1994 in the present tense and he had been talking about it for a long time but there was so much bile on both sides that the album wasn't able to be promoted effectively and it's very hard when you work for a record company and an artist is talking [ __ ] about you to feel good about promoting the record and making them a star that was some of the strongest work we did but the events and the emotional climate at the time was hardcore man I remember coming to rehearsal and just sometimes having a headache just from the stress alone of just we could just it was just all it was pushing us to our limits I'll say that from my as my opinion and we were all kind of just wow this is a weird place to be in and unpredictable from day to day and Prince basically figured out a way to distill his derision into really great art Fritz was in a way returning to a form that was more familiar there was really not you know any rap music you know any rapping going on a lot of the musical arrangements were pretty straightforward and again you know I I bless electronics more real play you know in a way it was a little bit like a chapter two of diamonds and pearls with a smaller ensemble and a lot of rage I think because it was such a scaled-down record you know I mean it has some bells and whistles on it but the core of the music was so organic you know and you could just hear it come out over all the other things there's a couple electronic little things on there but I think because it was just so so warm that sounds warm when she's released and for very good reason it's again kind of like diamonds and pearls was in a way it's a collection of great songs there's not another high concept work there's a bit of stuff there's an mpg operator telling you Prince is dead there's the segues which are kind of designed to make it seem like you're listening to an interactive experience you know you press a button and you get there come experience with the gold experience or whatever experience is coming out and answer but that doesn't really detract away from what a great songs you're on P controller a fantastic song you have the most beautiful girl in the world turns up on an album there you have gold it's kind of an attempt to do a purple rain for the 90s but for me it kind of works as well and it's sort of it's that moment where his production was very heavy very dense but it hasn't quite overdone it just yet and he still manages to bring out good songs things like the BG operator and downloading experiences it just began to see a future a time when things were more interactive and I think in a way it's a metaphor for just removing the large corporation and being a more direct you know source for you know your arty [Music] begins in a schoolyard a little girl skipper both with her friends the fights [Music] [Music] College they jumped up everyone up there work for free no so what if my sister just don't know tell me what you told me [ __ ] control the live shows off the back of this were great as well it's a period that sort it's been really Dover the years I think at the time a lot of people went and were disappointed that he wasn't playing the old material but he was going on stage playing the new material because he wasn't playing any prints but prints material anymore and when you listen to a lot of the live shows now you just realized that he he this is an album where he still got it and he still staking a claim for himself in the 90s as a freshly minted independent artist Prince started to make conciliatory noises towards his former employers he claimed to harbor no ill will and that his issue had never been with Warner Brothers specifically but with the whole edifice of music economics he made remarks to the press that were received at the time as oblique or eccentric telling the enemy that once the Internet is a reality the music business is finished in retrospect however Prince's statements were prophetic the portents of a man who appeared into the future and perceived the digital frontier with uncommon clarity in 1999 will be free and we can sell the music directly to the consumer and we can give it away if we want in retrospect Prince's problem really wasn't with Warner's as much as it was the industry itself I mean person was ahead of his time he was absolutely right many of the things that he griped about I thought he was dead on record companies had their heads in the sand they were all on automatic pilot the business model was stale we would have meetings where he would frustratingly want to figure out alternative ways to release and promote records because he was so dissatisfied with how labels conducted business now he was signed to Warner's so of course his frustration is directed to Warner's because that's what he was in business with but it wouldn't have been any different that he'd been signed to Columbia or RCA or any any place else because it was it was the business model itself the industry and how it functioned it frustrated him I really think that prints is a person has really great ideas and he sometimes he's too far ahead of the curve and other people don't know how to catch up with him and maybe it's not even a good idea because sometimes have you seen too far into the future it can be problematic for everybody involved I remember him telling us one day music is gonna be sold you know back and forth by computers we're like get out of here man what are you talking about you know but lo and behold you know so many things in the story of prints throughout the 90s feel anticipatory feels like he's Merlin living life in Reverse right so that in 1995 he says what the internet really really gets going like if there's a real internet like if what they're saying happens it's the end of the music industry and everyone says is it kind of nutty this because he's changed his name to the symbol thing and he's writing slave on his face and he's got that beard that's not quite a beard but you don't know what it is so we don't have to take this seriously and it turns out he's completely right completely right and his whole attitude about not owning his masters not owning is publishing owing his record company money for his work all of this which leads him to declare himself a slave well if you said that now if you said the artist seemed enslaved to the record company system everyone would go like yeah tell me something I don't know in 1992 Prince he was Prince then signed a hundred billion dollar contract with Warner Brothers Records the biggest deal in the industry but their deal turned into a public feud over who would have the control and protested that contract the artist scrawled the word slave on his face but y'all remember this faith all those years or all those times you were walking around with slave on the side of your face what was that all about to clarify that so people don't get the wrong impression I am I never meant to be compared to any slave in the past or any slave in the future the slavery that I had undergone was in my mind and as well as the business that I was in we inked a one hundred million dollar deal with Warner Brothers and that turned out to be a little less than desirable one hundred million dollars did deal yeah what all that meant yeah it's like I was saying before that you can go into record you can go into do some form of art and if you uh you have any sort of chains on you it's not gonna come out is cool as it could be so you felt as an artist enslaved yes it sounds like you've grown no I'm pretty much the same you know yeah yeah I I really do feel I have inside do you think that it would have happened to you had you not been enslaved oh no absolutely not and I you know I some days I want to just call up the folks at Warner Brothers and just I Love You Man really yeah just because of the journey and they're part of the experience I I'm thankful to them for giving me the opportunity to be here talking to you you know as time goes on a lot of major artists today and now leaving their major record labels behind most notably you get Radiohead doing that in 2007 and sort of striking out on their own setting up their own boutique labels and you get Jack White doing that with third man radio had have done that when they released their in rainbows album and the thing is that Prince was sort of 10 or 15 years ahead of all of these guys and trying to get away from a traditional business model where you had a major label that gave you money to do stuff and then you went off on the back of that and trying to take things under his own control free to record release and conduct his affairs as he saw fit prince set about reorganizing his life in 1996 while warner brothers were promoting chaos and disorder an album of castoffs that they had received in the divorce settlement Prince was dismantling the new power generation and putting together a different band albeit still under the same name he married mighty Garcia who subsequently felt pregnant with their first child and relaunched his public profile frequently granting interviews and appearing on television chat shows please welcome back to the program the artist formerly known as Prince tragedy struck towards the end of the year when Prince and my tazed son was born with Pfeiffer syndrome and died within a few days now carrying sole responsibility for his business affairs Prince hit the news from the public and rather than take a break here amped-up promotional activity for his forthcoming album emancipation released on the 19th of November 1996 emancipation was billed as Prince's definitive artistic statement three discs of music held back from Warner's that represented years of his strongest work despite an initial surge in sales however the record slowly drifted out of view after only a few short weeks on the chart [Music] I do remember a funny situation where Michael Jackson had just put out history and prints notice and SoundScan that it was a double record so he got credit for double the numbers looks like I could make a three CD record and get tripled and get up like why can't you sound wise I think there there's a difference I mean that sound even moved into a different spot actually from previous things because it was like more like he was like I'm moving on from where I was I'm trying to move to another level I want to try something the thing is by this point it's three hours worth of prints material that's kind of it's sort of neither here or there there was some great stuff on it you know that's facedown which kind of funky upbeat song it's hard not to enjoy that when you get to the end of the second disc you get a great run of songs where you really feel princes engage with what he's doing he is you know he's about to become a father for the first tunnel for the only time and you can really feel this coming through in the music and that is quite an enjoyable thing to hear but over three discs you also get a lot of stuff that's just kind of Prince doing R&B at the time [Music] [Music] [Applause] I think that France made a real push and you know it was doing more interviews at the time he needed to get out there because he knew the next step is gonna be I'm on my own I need to reconnect with my families and gain new fans as possible that was the feeling I got from the NASA patient that was all about okay now there's you know there's a fear factor to being free and prince's immediate fear was the parlous state of his finances the toxic combination of lavish spending and declining income had driven him to the threshold of bankruptcy and the Mirage of the 100 million dollar contract had long since vanished in the desert of his label war though shipping a three-disc set had charged the figures and seen emancipation certified platinum the reality was that the album had sold barely half a million copies during his time with Warner's these figures would have seemed catastrophic but in the new independent era the picture was markedly different with all revenues accruing directly to Prince he found himself in healthy profit and was encouraged to bring his revolution to another branch of the music industry establishment the artist formerly known as Prince held a press conference Tuesday morning in New York City to announce his first full-fledged US tour since 1991 the tour actually kicked off Monday night at pine knob near Detroit and continues Wednesday at Jones Beach in New York the artist said that during the 30 day tour he'll be joined at various dates by no doubt Lenny Kravitz George Clinton and Chaka Khan and Santana he also said that he'll grant requests made over the Internet on this tour and will playing such classics as Purple Rain and little red Corvette in order to avoid ticket scalping he said he won't be publishing a tour itinerary instead he'll be announcing shows through local media several days in advance of each concert just as album releases traditionally took place via record companies the live concert business was populated by squadrons of intermediaries promoters agents and assorted middlemen that had designed the whole architecture of music tools it was a system that ensured that together they culled a healthy profit from any artists going out on the road once again print challenged the orthodoxy embarking on a tour in which he handled venue booking ticket sales and marketing himself cutting out concert promoters and ensuring that he retained all the fruits of his labor the sales for emancipation wouldn't have really mattered to Prince too much I mean they were to an extent obviously but he didn't need to make as many sales as he would have done under his old Warner Brothers contract I think emancipation sold about 450,000 copies and Prince claimed to have been five million dollars in profit and I think if you look at it people have suggested that for him to have even broken even under his Warner Brothers contract it would have had to have sold 500,000 copies which is more than the album actually did so for Prince it's an unqualified success he has been able to come out like the most beautiful girl in the world when he when he sat as a single and he hit number one and he's proved he can do on his own certainly in financial terms emancipation has proven to him that you can do it on his own again and Prince was out on the road for the best part of 12 months so he'd be selling merchandise he'd be selling gig tickets and as long as people were coming to the shows which they were in droves Prince would just be making money hand over fist over these things especially for being on tour for such a long stretch of time there are times when I remember the road manager in the booking agent at that time in the 90s said okay this is Monday Prince wants to do a show on Thursday a twenty thousand seat arena he just woke up and said I want to do a show and he's the only artist that I've ever worked with and have said I want to do a show on Thursday and here it is Monday at a twenty thousand seat arena and it sells and I saw that happen many times the touring business like the record business had an established traditional business model there were certain promoters that were experienced and legitimatize by their relationships with artists and managers known to be dependable efficient so on and same with agents and it was a you know a network of people that were accustomed to producing tours and doing it properly and and productively and profitably and you know we were very successful into tapping into that network and exploiting it properly prints didn't make a lot of money on his most famous tours in the eighties simply because they were production heavy which was something he insisted on he wasn't the least bit interested in production budgets we would bring things to his attention and and the the pre-production phase was always painful because it would invariably be conversations like prints that's a great creative a theatrical idea but here's what it's gonna cost well I pay you to go find the money I don't care what its gonna coke or what it's gonna cost make it happen but it's very obvious to me that he's figured it out he's figured out how to have a viable theatrical production that's competitive and proper and at the same time streamline the number of people he has on the road and what he pays for and what he doesn't pay for and by cutting out the you know he's not paying management commission he's not paying percentages through a lot of people who take percentages and in the traditional tour business model so he is touring way more profitably now than he ever did it in his peak peak years in terms of record sales and it's it's remarkable and it's a credit to his business sense because he's really really figured out how to make a ton of money on the road without compromising the quality of his shows and I had the hat's off and I think it's great in running concerts independently Prince was estimated to have netted thirty million dollars from 1997's Jam of the year tour alone in just 18 months he had rebuilt his entire fortune and had done so on his own terms having relaunched his career prince was ready to turn his mind back to the future and venture into the unknown territory of the coming cyber age he announced that he would release crystal ball a box set comprising three CDs of material and rarities from the vault together with a fourth disc of new songs entitled the truth if he received a minimum number of advance orders through his website love for one another calm and his phone line one 800 new funk it was a bold and unprecedented venture into e-commerce but was beset by problems that provoked consternation among fans as a first step to realizing the ultimate goal of becoming a self-contained artistic and commercial entity however prince was often running Prince doesn't get enough credit for what he was doing in the late 90s when rady had reached there in rainbows box set throughout their website in 2007 that's 10 years later but people acted like it was the first time anyone had ever done this sort of thing but when you get Prince doing in 97 he's taking pre-orders for the crystal ball box set and he became the first artist to sell an entire album online direct to his fans the whole marketing thing he went straight to the people who he wanted to sell it to there's no middleman there was no need for a record label printers took it all under his own umbrella organisation and I think that is incredibly forward-thinking he'll have schemes ideas that prove prescient I'm gonna take orders for my album online I'm going to use a 1-800 number where you can call up and buy it like it Stella marketed album but I'm gonna take orders online Wow who does that will that work in the 90s nobody really knows people haven't done it before now of course it is the entire record business but then it's a little weird and it doesn't quite work it ends up that the fans who order the record have to wait longer than the fans who go to the record store to buy it they get different packages people aren't sure what they're buying now it feels like things are unraveling and again Prince just keeps going forward and forward and forward was it a feeling of him taking a lot on his shoulders yes course it is of course it is I'm sure that was a heavy weight for him because he knew he was making a stance it had not been done in that way and the fact that he did it and he stood alone through all scrutiny and I was there to witness that you know but he kept going he didn't complain he just kept doing what he was doing and I admired and I told him I said I really respect the fact that you've taken this stance because it comes a time there has to be a change you know I think what he underestimated was the complications that can come in just with the busy work involved with physically packaging and mailing code to the post office and mailing these things in a timely fashion is is pretty damn labor-intensive I think he may have underestimated that part of it but you know there again that's just the busy work it's the concept that we're dealing with here with a leader like Prince who has that kind of influence so he was definitely ahead of the game as to how much attention people were paying I mean I honestly think that by the late 90s it was pretty clear to everybody who cared that you know what what Prince saw some years earlier was coming to fruition [Music] [Music] the corollary to Prince's criticisms of the record business came at the turn of the millennium when the music industry suddenly spectacularly imploded over the course of the 1990s the industry had become a risk-averse money-making machine monopolized by just a few major labels who use their muscle to arrange the market in their favor and dictated their terms to artists and consumers alike the quiet migration of prints and others to the Internet proved to be the precursor to a general Exodus when the peer-to-peer file-sharing website Napster launched in 1999 consumers rushed to download and distribute music free of charge and having neglected to develop a viable commercial presence in cyberspace the industry was overwhelmed artists most prominently Metallica lined up to condemn Napster and The Recording Industry Association of America began feverishly issuing lawsuits American intellectual property is our nation's greatest trade assets we cannot stand idly by as our nation's assets are in jeopardy or dismissed by those who would use them for their own enrichment record companies fought tooth and nail over the issue the courts agreed it's the record companies who hold the patent on cheating musicians out of money it was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic although the cumulative weight of lawsuits eventually shut down Napster the music business faced total collapse and artists looked to establish a new digital economy in which to commercialize their work they had their heads in the sand and the evidence is very plain and simple Napster came from outside the industry the record industry was so myopic about technology all a record company knew in the 80s was if you had a new product you went to the radio station programmers that you knew you made a video and you took it to MTV and B et and anybody else who would play a video and you had a PR person go to the print media into any magazine and anybody else who might write something about your artist you hired friends of friends the people that worked for labels used to be programmers at radio stations I mean it was this inbred world that had fed on itself for so many years and basically it had worked so successfully and so many careers had been made by it and people were loyal to it and they took vacations together and they party together and they married each other and it was this whole atmosphere of we have this winning business model so let's not don't fix it if it isn't broken well the problem was it was broken or it was about to break you see I'm not a Napster fan I don't it seems to me like people are getting ripped off I don't understand it other than all I know it's these people who put money out putting work out there and somebody is enjoying it without my informant well the it's interesting because the artists don't get paid anyway no I mean there's maybe 10 or 12 of them that have semi-decent deals and the rest of them are you know what was happening in the record industry in the mid-90s was a transition from grunge to teen pop so from unmanageable drug-addicted band you when you're selling a 35 cent product for $16 so the record bin is it's making buckets of money buckets and buckets of money nobody thinks things are going to go bad nobody sees what's happening prints well if the Internet becomes a reality you guys are finished and what do you do if you're at a record company you get back into the hot tub and you smoke another cigar when you hear that you don't go like I think he's right because he's been right about everything else up till now it is this big unwieldy behemoth now and it's kind of also happily ripping off its customers I think many people kind of that's that's an agreement now it was over pricing CDs you know now everyone knows you can buy a CD for 50 P or something like that why were you being charged 18 quid for a single CD up to 25 quid for double CD discs and it seems now in retrospect that the record label had become hugely greedy in the 90s and were more interested in making money over as opposed to making say art quote unquote old capital layout and we want to put it and so I think that by the time you as print said when the Internet is coming the industry is over it's because by the time things like Napster and everything came out everyone realized that they were being ripped had been been ripped off for years nobody saw the digital revolution coming to the degree to the public degree the Princeton I don't think artists didn't you'd hear people talking about there'd be various internet soothsayers going around saying what they expected could happen but the concept of music being a digital file the concept of music no longer being an object that you had to go to the store and buy wasn't something that most people could grasp until Napster hit [Music] the industry was gone it was over just literally overnight and and I remember there used to be little signs of worry something's gonna change here but we don't know what it is and we're not really taking the time to figure out what it is we're just going to wait and react because what we have is too good it's too easy and it's working too well so we'll just kind of wallow in it and when the [ __ ] hits the fan will react to it well too late princes eventual response to Napster was to embrace it publicly stating that there was nothing to fear and even taking the radical step of releasing a single on the platform in 2001 in the late 90s however he was focused on the first work of a new era both emancipation and crystal ball included songs there were a hangover from the Warner's period but in 98 the first big release of all new material was announced confusingly new power soul was credited to the new power generation although Prince energetically promoted it as his new album he was accompanied during the campaign for new power soul by both former Sly Stone bassist Larry Graham and Chaka Khan and he encouraged the public to buy their new records which will be issued on his MGP label in a move that recalled the original concept for Paisley Park the greatest album Warner Brothers Records I was afforded the luxury of create state-of-the-art studio and my dream was always to help my heroes so they come to my place and they record for free and the rest of the money we turned into gold and you're gonna be touring together - isn't that right yes now I know you wrote I feel a new power soul the sound he was creating for us and himself at that time was just something that that's just another part of Prince you know in his head he he listens to so many different genres of music and he respects so many artists so it's amazing that he hasn't put out even more style so I looked at it as okay this is our and B this is soul this is rock this is funk this is you know it's a lot of things together you know I don't think any of us gave it any thought because we know how his mind works you know a lot of times when you are at majors they make you stay in a genre and say this is what you known for this is what we're going to sell these the markets that we have created for you but he feels like market is universal I hear the transition from what was his past to that time [Music] I know [Music] if I get my baby the wrong [Music] noop our soul was received poorly dismissed by press and public alike while it languished in the charts Prince took possibly the worst public relations decision of his career he started suing his own fans in early 99 the first installment in what would become an unfortunate trend during his years as an independent artist hit the news writs were issued against fan sites magazines and message boards alleging copyright and trademark infringement and pulling music video and images over the course of an ongoing legal action so far as Prince was looking to embrace the Internet it seemed that it would be exclusively on his own terms Prince starts soon his fans in late 90s it was seen as hugely reactionary I mean first of all they were fans so the people you shouldn't sue they're the people who supported him through Warner Brothers but also part of his problem was with the internet and it starts to seem that he was trying to control the Internet and you had David Bowie know another ally embrace of the Internet with Bowie net and things I think he said you know he didn't understand why Prince was doing this and he said you know you can't stop this you can't hold back mercy I think he said or something like that and it kind of made in a bit of a shame that prints the guy who had pioneered just a few years before the internet distribution and you know interacting with your fans on the internet which is perfect for Prince anyway he's quite reclusive character and it kind of it allows him to interact with his fans while remaining at a certain distance he's pointed all this and then you know his fans might have their own websites and he kind of wants them to shut it down and it kind of again he sort it's not good PR to do that when you've kind of you've made a point of breaking this new ground yourself you say so-called fans on the Internet which is kind of a problem sometimes because once they use the symbol it's as though I've endorsed whatever it is that they have for sale I think it's more than a touch it for critical I understand the privacy issues I understand the obtrusiveness of the press and the paparazzi but I also understand that if you're a public persona and you make your living by marketing yourself to the public that it goes with the turf to turn your back on any and everybody who wants to pay you attention well then if that's the case you should be the artist who privately makes records does not tour does not perform publicly and stay in your house if that's what you want to be then be that but if you're gonna come out and sell tickets to 20,000 people to come here you play and sit in a seat and stare at you then you can't get angry because they're staring at you as his argument with the fans rumbled towards the courts prints stunned the music world by announcing his return to a major record label [Music] a 1cd deal with a record company that is not your normal record company why'd you do this well Clive Davis and I sat down and talked about how to create a artists record label agreement that was in fact that an agreement not a contract I'm not restricted by any needs I think all artists should be under agreements Lenny Kravitz for example a friend of mine and we hang out she put a lot of time talked about an album we'd make together but you know he's still on plantation so when he comes on up north yes would need and we can do something for him about to divorce from Maite and at a crossroads in his career Prince sought to lighten the burden of self-releasing and thrashed out a one album deal with industry heavyweight Clive Davis at Arista Records Davis had been busy rehabilitate in the career of Carlos Santana with supernatural an album that went on to become a record breaking multi-platinum sensation he spotted an opportunity to kickstart something similar with Prince and offered the artist and 11 million dollar advance plus ownership of his master for Raven to the joy fantastic to come out on Arista on its release in November however Raven to the joy fantastic performed poorly with lead single the greatest romance ever sold only reaching number 63 on the chart Prince blamed everything other than the work itself accusing Clive Davis of breaking his promises and failing to adequately promote the album when Prince under the wrister for Raven to the Jorah fantastic in 1999 again the the model that he starts to work with at this time and he'd done with emancipation he carried on to uses this package distribution deal so Prince would sign for a one-off deal one-off album with the label so that they could he would use their clout essentially to get it into shops and to get it out there but all the recording costs and all the production costs and things that Prince would assume those himself what it would mean is that he would own nothing to the label no recording cost methylate would have nothing to recoup because Prince had didn't pay all the money himself but they would have the manufacturing with distribution means to be able to get it out there to be able to make it high-profile release so in a way he's kind of piggybacking on the the bigger structure that a major label has and China of using loans to get him into the shops one of the problems that he had when he was releasing things on mpg and this came out with the new pair solo album at the same time he had side projects by Larry Graham and Chaka Khan and he was finding trouble having trouble trying to get them into the shops and what heiress to Records wants out of this is a chance to be part of the rebirth of a great artist because they put out a Santana record to become the biggest record in the world but Santana record was a very Craven commercial record where the artist listened to the record company step by step by step the prints album is an album the prints made have brought to a record company and said if you want it we can do business together so now made on his own terms some purposes it's not a craven commercial record it's not his best or his worst record it's not a particular price that it isn't a big thing that an artist just reaches a point in their career where they're only relevant to the die-hard fan base and the phenomenon of buying their new music isn't the same as buying a ticket to see them perform and when you go see them perform if you're a real serious fan you may tolerate them playing two or three new songs but basically you go hear the songs that they made famous and that's what you want to hear and it's just nature it's just that's how it goes so the fact that the record didn't sell through the roof isn't necessarily a statement that the record isn't good enough or wasn't promoted properly and interestingly in his recently published book which is a big thick book in which Clive Davis talks about just about every record he ever anything to do with he doesn't talk about brave I have to ask Clive what that means but it's a glaring omission so there's something about that that didn't settle well that's for sure [Music] with his status as an elite chart act vanishing prince turned his back on the mainstream he returned to the project of realizing artistic freedom in cyberspace in 2001 he launched the MGP music club a groundbreaking subscription website through which he issued smaller more experimental records to a dedicated fan base the MGP music club is kind of the apogee of princes vision if you like of everything that he was working towards since leaving Warner Brothers it's a subscription-based site and I think the subscription started off at $100 and was dropped to 25 when Prince's sort of release rate slowed but the idea being that fans would sign up to the music club and in return that they would get priority seats at concerts they would get exclusive music club merchandise they would get CDs since then whenever Prince had a new album instead of having to release it into the shops he's giving it direct to the fan base direct to the people that want it and they would also get download music from him as well this would turn up in their computer and this is the exodus album the second new power generation album terrible album as it is this is stuff that he was talking about on that record saying yeah I think there's a lyric or spoken word piece that says you know you need to be free from a contract if you ki if you were able to download your music to your listeners computer or something like that and sort of all these years later that is what he's doing it's the great combination of everything he's worked for to be able to cut out the middleman cut out a record label Prince's on one side of the screen his friends on the other side and everything comes out direct to them now tell me about the MGP music club how does this work [Applause] but you have to order it through yeah sorry about it by dialing up w w DG newzik club comm you can get access to brand new music as well as preferred seating at concerts awesome how do I become a preferred customer well you got some preferred money freezes early efforts online were actually very strong when they worked which they didn't always technologically I mean but they were I don't know if I'd say visionary but they were very forward-thinking um in terms of building a community himself artists have been very very successful with that in recent years especially he was he was pretty far ahead of his time fans who weren't signed up to that we would have missed out on one night alone solo piano album which is a lovely little record and quite hard to get out of now I think yet these n PG audio shows you know it's a kind of done that radio shows you online that be online singles and stuff like that and it just seemed like a new flow of print stuff to the people who wanted it as opposed to having to get sort of in sharp battles and stuff like that and I think FEMA was a success prince was totally blazing a trail for this and pioneering it and you find out in a few years time when he starts his musicology downloads store I think he even opened that online download store even before the iTunes Store started by matter of months you're talking but still princes just goes to show that business wise Prince's they're really up with it up with what's going on he really understands how this thing works having established the music Club Prince issued a new studio album initially through the club and subsequently on general sale titled the rainbow children and released in November 2001 it accompanied a series of changes in the artists life and identity almost unnoticed by the wider public the infamous symbol had been dropped and Prince had reverted to using his original name he had also come out as a Jehovah's Witness having been gradually initiated into the faith by his spiritual mentor Larry Graham over the course of the late 90s indeed on New Year's Eve 2001 Prince married his new partner Manuela testily knee in a jehovah's witness ceremony Larry Graham taught me so much Larry could you just stand up [Music] I've learned so much but I've been musically and then when I met him he's taught me so much about the truth the artist joints us great to have you here happy holidays I don't celebrate holidays but thank you very much well it's nice to have you here at this time of year the more I study the Bible with the help of diagram and some of my good friends I realize that hard feelings I had weren't really directed towards them as it was the idea of this thing like I said called entropy we're getting to the point now where the truth is being lost in music I was discussing this with Larry today we were just discussing the word inspiration and where we think it originated from and ultimately you you know you did you go back your father may inspire you and then that and your father his father inspired him and his father may have inspired him should we get to Adam and eventually Adam had a father when you get the inner calling to do something and you know it that you're being inspired by God and you pretty much know you better answer that call or suffer the consequence you think this was God inspired as well I I do believe yes the rainbow children was a musical exploration of the Jehovah's Witness religion and perhaps unavoidably a polarized opinion when the rainbow children came out interesting little time because prints for the first time in years he goes back to calling himself Prince now and I think you can look at that as being one he's got as an album but it's so dear to his heart is so it's an exploration and the celebration of the Jehovah's Witness faith so no wonder he's calling himself Prince again this is the oven he's returning with I believe it's his most artistically successful album of the new millennium he has done that recording album there has been as satisfying a listen since as a whole album the problem is that unless you're a doubt Jehovah's Witness believer it's a real turnoff because it's the hardest aspects of his fame but had the most interesting collection of songs what I didn't like was the annoying what I thought was annoying kind of narrate narrative segues in between the songs and some of the controversial politics in some of the lyrics that touched on religion and so on creating a successful artistic piece of work after years you know trying to chase trends or chase sort of you know whatever is going to sell this is an album that it's not concerned with sales is concerned with what Prince wants to say and you can feel that in the album but lyrically this concept about you know it's the only about story about the Jarvis Witness faith it's got this slowed down sort of godlike voice Susan Marin narrator on it which it's kind of heavy going lyrically and you kind of have to actively shut that part unless you're totally into this you have to actively shut your brain off to that sort of part and just injury them you for what it is and the music is fantastic and it's it's an album that you should certainly be discovered more than it is it's kind of seen as that Jehovah's Witness album but most many yeah about fanatical fans anyone who knows it oh it's the one we need to get over but it's actually just a fantastic fantastic piece of work the rainbow children failed to make any impression on the public consciousness and the trend continued over the next few years as Prince released a succession of niche albums via the music club that anyone beyond the subscription list would have scarcely been aware of a high-profile re-emergence came in 2004 with a flamboyant performance at the Grammy Awards where Prince played a medley of hits alongside Beyonce the show was lauded as a stunning comeback with critics heaping praise on the stage craft and musicianship as a show business personality Prince found himself suddenly thrust back into the limelight after years of invisibility nostalgia follows cycles an artist has to go away for a while to be missed and princes sort of self-imposed artistic pigheadedness you know I'm doing this and everybody will follow me or don't that isolated him to a degree no record label no promotion enough years had passed from the the battles with Warner Brothers and all the weird stuff he was saying and he was back and he was approachable and he was on TV and there he was on the Grammys with Beyonce taking his getting his propers you know his music was coming back in a lot of ways there it reaches a point with an artist where the greatness no matter how strangely they've behaved no matter how many bad recordings they've put out their greatness becomes undeniable and that's when you start looking backwards [Music] [Music] see it [Music] the fact is that anybody who cares to know recognizes that prince is one of if not the most influential brilliantly gifted rock stars of the last 40 years there is no question that the younger artists particularly in the black music realm basically worship him as a mentor as someone who opened doors for them in incorporating rock and other elements into the music he arguably changed the music and what was expected of and what was appropriate for a young black artist to do and he's he's an icon to anybody who cares about that kind of stuff so the fact that he has that kind of influence and the fact that someone is hugely successful is in contemporary as Beyonce would give him that kind of dapple on stage in public is is a smart move because it reminds the casual fan of his iconic status he's seen as this great reemergence of a guy where has he been for so long oh my God look at him and there's a sort of certain Vegas II aspect to that performance but he totally nailed it he's looking great in his purple suit he's with Beyonce that you know trading off each other and you know for a sort of brief slot on the Grammys it's a fantastic sort of return to prove that he's a great hit making machine remind people of these hits in the first place and sort of sets himself up then for one of the greatest success of his career prince capitalized on the Grammy performance by holding a press conference in which he announced a forthcoming album musicology and an accompanying tour while also objecting to talk of a comeback noting that he had never gone away both the album and tour were enormously successful musicology climbed to number 3 on the Billboard chart and was nominated for five Grammy Awards while the tour was the year's number one concert draw giving Prince his longest run of gigs since Purple Rain and pulling in an estimated 87 million speaking of comebacks prince played two sold-out shows at the Air Canada Centre this past week and the concert goers received his lay CD music Ozzy and they were entertained to more than two and a half hours of new songs and of course classic hits you guys buy any merchandise the album the album's very good does it get the respect that it deserves no of course not because again this is this moment where people are discovering that what they want out of Prince is this incredible live moment and in a way can you blame them you know there's a musicology it's a great Prince album well I got a great Prince album in fact I've got six of them live business and recorded music business not just because people can get the recorded music for free but because the live business sometimes they refer to it as a perishable experience you know a little term of business that you don't hear much unless you're in the music business or the sports live entertainment business anything that is a live moment he's thought of as a perishable experience because if you're there it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience and when Prince is up at the Grammys people realize oh snap I don't show up in his next concert I might miss this [Applause] performing his greatest hits live for the last time in the whelming demand two shows have been added may 24th an arrowhead pond of Anaheim and may 26th at Staples Center don't wait get your tickets now at the pond parks office Ticketmaster charge by phone or offline buy a ticket and get the new print CD free friends who came to a maybe a realization maybe just a tipping point with things maybe he was just tired of a really small number of people caring about what he was doing and when he would play the older songs at his at the concerts he probably was struck by the difference in the reaction so the 2004 tour that tour was really really interesting because you had both old songs and you had a few new songs and it was the sort of classic model you see with a lot of artists today he hadn't been playing the hits on a big stage for a really long time so the 2004 tour was in many ways a comeback tour he did play some new material on those on those dates and it was like when you'd go to see the Rolling Stones it's like you know they played miss you and everybody jumps out of their seats and they played they say okay here's a new song and everybody takes a bathroom break it there was a lot of that going on that was an enormous ly successful tour it put a ton of money in his pocket it got a lot of his swagger back I think and he just looked great he sounded great and people realized how much they had missed him and by airing a lot of those old songs he can he allowed people to realize how much they had missed him musicology proved to be yet another innovative leap in post Napster business practice leveraging his stratospheric popularity as a live draw Prince gave away copies of the album with concert tickets as he looked to maximize revenue from his shows to his enduring satisfaction the results of the move provoked howls of protest from the major record labels but it also sparked an industry-wide shift from CDs to gigs as the primary source of artist income with the musicology release in 2004 Prince went back to a major label again this time Columbia to sort of give them that you know the P and D D or the one-off deal with but he came up with an interesting deal this time around and so they would put it in the shops but he would be allowed to put it out through his website the music in musicology record store which he launched a sort of download store which was a great success for him but also he gave it away free with tickets to the musicology tour and Nestle where it starts to get interesting for musicology and prints because what happened was Nielsen SoundScan ended up having to count those ticket giveaways because there was a purchase because someone had given money and received the album in return the ended up having to count those ticket giveaways as sales they did it from the day that musicology entered the store as well but what it meant was that the album all of a sudden hit number three in the chart and became an unqualified success for prints when really you know he hadn't had a chance success in a long time the rules were made by people who don't really play music so I think some of them need to be rewritten in fact I believe SoundScan has already changed the way they're going to account for other groups in the future who used the same strategy here but you've been grandfathered in for musicology well to some degree we have all truth be told SoundScan has not really counted all the albums that have gone out to concert goers and album is included in a ticket price and we do get paid back for the the album sale at the same time there's roughly 450,000 copies that they haven't counted so the stroke of brilliant luck if nothing else because all of a sudden he had a record that qualified for a chart impact those qualified to sales billboard quickly changed that afterwards never thought it was brilliant using Columbia to manufacture and distribute the CD but that's it talk to me a little bit about the role of music labels well for real artists such as myself I'm trying to make a career out of this so I don't want to just have one album and then out of here that's what a lot of young acts are about these days and the record companies are cool with that because then they kind of get a disposable quick fix of these young and then move on to the next one they also don't have to make any long-term deals which means that the act is going to make a great deal more money than just coming out with their first record the situation I have with Sony is unique in the sense that they respect my career and they understand that it's important that we own the work so there isn't an issue about that and they've just been beautiful all the way around it doesn't really matter if the arm is going to be a commercial success or not or what's on it in this case because it's less about the new album princess I'm not gonna play great dinner songs from it anyway he's going to play the hits again then it is about getting people to come and see him live and so instead of trading off on his new music he starts to trade off on his live show which is he's always had a fantastic live show but he really starts to push that forward I mean what you see coming down the line you see not long after this you get this whole concept of 360 deals and you would get major artists signing to tour promoters rather than to record labels because the feeling starts to become the artists are going to make their money through the live show and they're going to make that money through merchandise sold at the desks they're going to make the money changes through ticket sales they're not going to make their money anymore through the release of a new album and so people start to it you know they're musicians they kind of have to put out new album simply want to at least have the semblance of being relevant in today's marketplace will still seem as though they're not necessarily oldies acts but everyone is really starting to gear their business model around the tour and prints with musicology with that being counted as ticket sales you know milk some had to change the way they counted these things after he kind of shook up the business again I mean the title of the tour said it all musicology and it was it was back to the music as the focal point which at the end of the day is what would saved him touring wise because he had been before that playing theatres and straining to sell them out and all of a sudden he's back in arenas and has stayed there since so I think the musicology tour was was kind of a wake-up call for him that if you if you pay a little more attention to music and less attention to the bells and whistles the people will come [Music] prince moved to consolidate his recent surge in popularity with a new studio album in 2006 during sessions for 3121 he retracted former members of the new power generation to help in assembling a collection of songs that would recall his classic sound when drummer Michael bland and bassist Sonny T arrived to start recording they found that their former bandleader was now carefully operating like a seasoned business executive thanks for coming everyone slavery's while I don't consider universal a slave ship first of all mostly the situation with Universal is similar for the one with Sony and so much is that I did my own agreement it wasn't a contract I don't believe in contracts and did my own agreement without the help of a lawyer and sat down and got exactly what I wanted to accomplish their goals that I was trying to accomplish we had made kind of an arrangement you know because I don't think he knew how many songs he really wanted to record or you know what was gonna happen to any of it so you know we had a literally like a formal agreement about like I think he'd become more cognizant of just how business works and I think for his own protection and to be able to you know show the nuts and bolts of it literally we had like a contractual agreement before we played it no and there was a sum of money and it was real nice and we probably cut 11 songs great I mean you know the the sound was really tight you know I mean you know his guitar playing had moved to another level from the last time I played with me you know that's what's the most you can hope for is to be better than what you were two or three years in the past you know if you're still working on your craft I mean if you get to the point where you just stopping and you just being a novelty you know it's time to just be a record exec at that point so he's still constantly growing and changing and the way I see it it's not a flawless album it's not even a classic album really but it's the best of that bunch it's the one where it sounds like he's trying a bit harder he's you know putting a bit more effort into it he's totally trading on his past with it he's nicking call and response motifs from time records to throw onto the end of lolita he's you know black sweaters quite a cool little track but it's really attracted it's kind of it's another French track but he's done the sort of thing of loads of times before you've got a song in there the dance which is one of the main highlights of it but that came from you would have found that before on the chocolate invasion album says an old song he's kind of reworked and we recorded for this record so it's not like Prince's just come up with a modern Prince album yeah that's it that's the most amazing album ever but it's kind of the most successful of those ones for me I think [Music] 3121 was the first Prince album to debut at number one and it confirmed his mainstream comeback over the following year he gave a series of garlic performances including a residency in Las Vegas and the halftime show at the Super Bowl playing the hits under his newfound status as a timeless American icon related recognition for his online initiatives also arrived as Prince received a Lifetime Achievement Award of the internet industry webbie's there were only a few weeks later he closed the MGP music club and announced that he was temporarily withdrawing from the web I think Prince caved to his legendary status I think he probably did that early in this millennium I think that happened with the 2004 tour when he started airing the hits again and I think he just decided to not necessarily stop but not exclusively banging his head against the wall trying to get his new material across to whatever audience would listen to it all those things contributed to that those are those are the biggest stages for an artist the Grammys the Superbowl greatest Superbowl performance of all time [Music] that's alright come on yeah [Music] don't it feel good steel can i play this guitar [Applause] it's hard to imagine that ever ever being tough he was at his best he knew that dozens or hundreds of millions of people were watching him and he only he was absolutely phenomenal getting five million dollars to play Coachella all of those things are him accepting and playing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and stealing the show okay Prince has always been one of the greatest guitarists of the rock era but because he does so many other things people don't really realize it that really established him there even the guys onstage with him you see them watching him play and they're just like damn all those things were him finally embracing his legendary status and not shunning it and in characteristic style Prince used this legendary status to once again push the frontiers of accepted business practice in July 2007 he released another new record planet Earth for free on the cover of UK newspaper The Mail on Sunday the giveaway was tied in with the forthcoming residency at London's o2 arena when both the 21 nights at the o2 as well as after shows at the indigo 2 Club sold out Prince had established yet another new model for the live performance market and rethought the role of albums within the context of artists income a lot of the songs on planet earth are very soothing for me so it to me represents a time that he felt a lot of peace a lot of calm you know of course a lot of spirituality a lot of it was really melodic I remember being on stage at our first sound check the o2 and one of the songs we were singing we were rehearsing and I kind of got lost in the song I closed my eyes and I missed some of the choreography transitioning and I looked up I opened my eyes and there he was on that big stage standing right next to me like I said oh god I'm sorry he said you were really into that I said yes other territories now the interesting things that part of that deal included the UK Sony distribution and they didn't seem to be in on this at all they didn't know what's going to happen so all of a sudden Prince's new album is a giveaway into the newspaper and there was outrage it was amazing because people were saying on the one hand you that cover mounts for years this was the first time a new album was ever given as a cover mount not an old sort of catalogue piece and so one side of the industry was samuel it cheapens the music if you're just going to give away new music you know the industry is it isn't dire straits as it is you can't just give this away Prince's argument however and what he claims he said to Sony was well I've just reached 300,000 people in one day were you gonna refer at the same amount of people with the album on the first day of sales which he would say no you weren't the prince was an unqualified success he's got a new album out to as many people as you can the issue of the mail that sold was dispersed second biggest selling issue that they've ever had underneath Diana's death so you know the Avery was kind of a win-win for everyone and I think princes estimated to have made somewhere between 200 and 500 thousand pounds off of this deal with the paper which is probably more than any advance he would have got for the one-off deal for the record in the first place from the record label and Prince again gave it out with tickets you know goodie I'm a freeway with tickets for his twenty one night stand in London so you start see again he's using my new album to drum up interest in his long residency in London and that's where the real money is coming in this time because we're 21 nights he's not moving around he was elated totally and we were happy because we only had one location we didn't have to move around you know so we had apartments there and he dressed up the Indigo made it look like Paisley Park with all his beautiful furniture and candles and incense and you know made an environment for us there it was fun there was a lot of fun you know he loved what he does obviously but it's a business for him it was an opportunity for him to just go and basically turn his Playhouse into something that's like a kingdom him he can just really sell fun and just do you know what he doesn't make money of course [Music] [Music] after the OT residency print starts charging several million dollars for one-off appearances at coachella private parties things like that and you really get the sense the prince as an artist is perhaps less interested in being currently an artist he was more interested in staging live events that he knows will get sales merchandise sales are really seeing that money understand that the the music industry right now is essentially a live industry the recorded music industry continues to struggle the live music industry had it struggle several years ago but right now is enormous ly healthy and that artists of Prince's stature could tour if they wanted to year after year four year playing the hits [Music] Princes approach to becoming the world's biggest independent artist was to do just that over the next few years he continued to foreground live performance while looking for ways to experiment with new business model [Music] in 2009 he broke with the pattern of single album deals with a record label and released a new album lotus flower under an exclusive agreement with the retailer target cutting out the major label distribution infrastructure entirely [Music] new albums including one from Korea Valente also only 1198 available this sunday lotus flower was accompanied by a new subscription website in a further attempt to commercialize his music on the internet but neither the album nor the website generated much enthusiasm from the public a year later another new record 2010 was issued again as a newspaper cover man but failed to replicate the success of Planet Earth as the suspicions grew that Prince was pursuing business goals of the expense of artistic quality however in 2013 a more promising project emerged when Prince announced the formation of a new band third eye girl and a new artistic vision began to take shape I would say that as Princess Cruise gone certainly this late stage he is much more interested in the money side of things than in the new art side of things i think the Warner Brothers thing it kind of left de scars with him obviously and yes part of the argument is that they were stifling him as an artist but I think also it's quite clear from his actions that part of the reasoning behind it was that they were also getting more money than they should have for his work interesting to see what he does next because he's got this third eye girl project at the moment which is one of the more interesting things he's done in a while and instead of just being you know turning out the hits as you've heard the hits for years and years and years he did that for the best part of a decade he's now got a sort of all-girl three-piece power trio behind him kind of hit or miss material but at least he's trying again to find some sort of artistic interest as Prince took to the road with third-eye girl the issues that he first confronted two decades earlier continued to preoccupy the music business artists rights the digital economy and how to commodify art in the 21st century have now become mainstream concerns grappled with by musicians and artists across the spectrum of popular culture what was first seen as a marginal tiff between a superstar and is paymaster's has proven to be the opening argument in a much wider conflict and prints a much misunderstood visionary the leading thinker the post-millennial music industry well it always takes one it takes one person to stand up and say this is wrong and I'm not gonna take it if you take it you an idiot you know and I think Prince ended up being that figure tragically with no one really understanding you know and having the stand on his own little area of land and claiming a lot of people couldn't relate I don't think it probably is a precursor to a situation like Napster had with Metallica where you know you get these you know bloviating you know these bloated rockstars : hey man you know we have 80 million dollars what we're supposed to have you know 200 million dollars as because you people are stealing our music and you know somehow they didn't they you know often when wouldn't the wealthy make us think about something people are skeptical and sometimes they're right to be so and sometimes that I really feel like the business world will catch up with him and will acknowledge the things that he tried he was a canary in a coal mine for an awful lot of things it's gonna be interesting to see how history looks back on his business efforts because he has tried almost everything I think people have learned that they could do it themselves and that you don't have to rely on somebody else to fulfill your dreams and the real deal is that what people don't realize or know is that Prince plays music because he loves to play music it's that it's it's for the love it's for the love for it's could be one of the most generous people you ever met you can also be shrewd and terrifying but the music is about the love he's kind of found a place of comfort that he seems comfortable with that works for him and if you want to revert to measuring success in terms of numbers the tickets he sells is phenomenal and certainly suggests that the world that large recognizes the icon that he is reinvented enormous ly talented gifted performer that he is I think in some ways the fact that he doesn't have to pretend to compete with the jay-z's of the world really puts him in a place where it may just be the best years of his career [Music] he gave up women for the stripes of the road [Music] oh great [Music] [Music] you you the story of prints and prints and Warner Brothers is so interesting because prints is the act example of what Warner Brothers considered itself to be about that is artists development even though prints wasn't exactly the artist they were thinking of when they created that philosophy in the 60s and 70s the way that Warner Brothers worked was we want to sign geniuses and give them room to develop as geniuses and if they have hits that's great prints is signed as a teenager to a fairly rich somewhat extravagant multi-album deal by today's standards it's insane he hasn't proven himself he lives in Minneapolis he makes a kind of music that generally doesn't sell that much it can do well on the R&B charts but at that moment Prince is signed in the 70s Michael Jackson is really still a kid there's no thought that he's going to be the huge pop success he becomes the relationship between Prince and Warner Brothers was never warm and fuzzy in the sense that he was never the kind of artist who would drop in the office and just hang out or work the building as we used to say from a promotional marketing sense walk around bring flowers to the receptionist's and flirt with the assistants and I mean he wasn't that guy there were a lot of artists who did do that they understood the edge that it gave them and the motivation it brought to the people who worked at the label on their behalf that was something the Prince had absolutely no interest in he may have at least grudgingly understood the need for it and just felt that hey that's what I hire you people for go work the building do what you got to do I don't care what you have to do I don't care how you do it you don't even need to report to me about it I make music I don't do that I don't think he has a very long attention span friends can get bored very easily so I think that was probably part of the conflict between him and Warner Brothers actually is that you have a person who is vital who was interested in getting ideas out immediately because if they sit too long they're going to die on the line and as an artist I can completely understand that but you know I can see the side of a corporation going well wait a minute we have the 13 other 1,300 other artists we got to deal with you know in this time frame and we only have so many you know minutes a week and so I just think it you know it's a situation where I mean eventually they were going to have to part ways because French was just cranking it out and they were like well what do we do with it you know Prince was was both prophetic and way ahead of his time when it came to understanding the effect that the digital age would have on the music industry must understand that this was a guy who was already looking for alternative means to market and promote music to the public because he was so dissatisfied with the old business model we had a meeting and this would have been 1990 1991 where he called me in and it was after he had delivered a record to Warner's and it was frustrated because they weren't in a hurry to put out another record again at the subject matter it once again become the fact that he was too prolific and giving Warner's product too quickly and in his frustration he was expressing to me you know we've got to find another way to get music to the public in fact what if we went to late-night television and did like these oldies packages that people sell and we actually marketed a record on our own label to the public and we just sold it by mail order we just do television adverts late at night and people write to post office box whatever whatever and we sell it through the mail and I said yeah that's great except for one problem you're in the contract to go to one of the others you can't legally do that well then let's it'll be your label you do it and we'll put a different name on it instead of prints we'll put something else and I said yeah but they're not going to prints lets they're not gonna sit and let you do that if you run a business you can't allow that to happen so put your Warner's hat on for a minute pretend you're mo Ostin what would you do you're gonna get a cease and desist and you're gonna legally prevent us I'm doing that well I don't care we got to do it then and I said furthermore I'm president of a label that's a joint venture I can't they're gonna have me in jail I can't be part of that put it on on my label I create a label I can't do that well then put it in your wife's name we'll call it Glenn records the he was serious and and I knew then that he was going to figure out some way to beat the system even if it wasn't legally acceptable he was going to push the envelope and of course that became npg records it became the record he made for that ended up coming out and npg under the name of the band that was really a prince record that Warner's had rejected I think when Prince changed his name of certainly damaging to his public image you've always got a hard core fact a group of fans that are going to follow him wherever he goes but then you've got a wider audience that he had a lot of salient points on what he was talking about when it came to artists rights when it came to things that you know owning your master takes one of the things he kept saying again with the tricky slavery imagery is if you don't own your masters your masters own new meaning that if he didn't own his master tapes the Warner Brothers were always going to own him but all of these salient points about artist rights and about freedom for an artist to create and to present their work to the public kind of got lost in the name change in the name-calling between him and Warner's and it wasn't you know kind of typical prints it wasn't well explained enough for people to be able to really get what he was trying to set apart from onstage where it was more of a rant but prints are sort of shown time and time again through lovesexy and other projects that he does have high concept ideas that he doesn't necessarily explain clearly enough for people to really grasp what he's getting out there to me was the bad guy wearing slave because I thought it was foolish now I understand he was marketing himself as the victim but somehow the guy who you know as I said he's he's the only slave who owned the plantation he was not a victim he was a guy who had sold millions and millions and millions of records through a record company that had indulged him with with projects that were in some cases Follies and had stood by him they had indulged him with the making of movies that arguably shouldn't have been made ie graffiti bridge and you know had they profited from it of course they're in a business but oh my god it's like he wasn't a slave his definition of slave was somebody who doesn't own his own masters the fact is that from the beginning of time master recordings of the equity in the recording industry the record companies pay every cost that has to do with the making of those records it's their reason for existing is to sell the product if they don't own the product they can't exist now I understand that's a dated business model that that business model is now obsolete that's why there's downloading that's why there's there's self produced records the digital age has changed all that and I get it and I don't even want to argue the morality of it maybe there should be maybe there should have been a rule years and years and years ago that said that after 10 years the ownership of a master reverts to the artist I could live with that but having worked for labels I understand that up until the digital age you needed a label it was the only way to saturate the marketplace and get your music to radio to the media to the public an artist couldn't do that and if you're gonna have to use these people to do that for you and to distribute the product to manufacture and professionally distribute it to the record stores efficiently and then they have to get paid and if they're gonna survive as an industry then they have to have some equity and the only equity was their artists contracts and the masters so the argument that every artist should own all of their masters in perpetuity doesn't make any sense it just doesn't make mathematical sense if you want that label to serve your needs they have to get something in return the negotiation with Warner's in 92 heads and it played a role in me leaving Paisley Park because clearly Prince and I disagreed on where Paisley parked the label was going it wasn't so much how much you I would been thrilled for him to get whatever he could get you know he's my guy I worked for him so I want him to have the biggest deal he can get the most successful profitable lucrative supportive deal he could get my fear was the support part was eroding I don't think he really cared about that because he was incredibly frustrated with the Paisley everybody was frustrated with Paisley Park to the label but I think at first Prince did seem like he might have brought the goods he had so many successful side projects and there was that period where you know Prince was recording so many full albums albums that weren't even get him released that were full of great material he just had so much going on it almost seemed like you know it was never going to run out so you could understand Warner Brothers wanting to get in on this as well and to sort of finance the label to encourage more of these great sewing projects to come out there's one point where time record the time records were really challenging Prince's own records on the R&B charts but sort of chance dataset as time went on I think Warner Brothers realized what a dog Daisy Park was turning out to be and they did try and keep him happy they gave him a brand new office they gave it they staffed it for him but Prince never even entered this office space that they gave him which kind of shows how disinterested Prince was running it as a label you know Prince at that time was he was a musician and he had ideas from a musician he standpoint insall a late eighties would pays a bug he wasn't really interested in running a record label at that point or certainly don't running one how they quite quite chippy runs we were all frustrated and justifiably so but what I kept pointing out to Prince was this is a joint venture we do have a responsibility to try to satisfy the other part of the joint in this case Warner's and in his in his mind that was kind of like oh you're for them now and I'm saying no it's not adversarial it shouldn't be I realized that it is in a practical level sometimes because we may say this record should get promotion and they may say it doesn't deserve it that's adversarial but as a as a as a company as a mentality as a business model you can't approach it as adversary because they're your partners and inescapably they're your partners so if we're gonna go forward we kind of have to hold hands and figure out a way to work together and and I know that sounds very simplistic but but it's it's the truth it's just a fundamental truth and you know as an artist he didn't really want to hear that and I understood that about him so it was kind of like you know what this isn't going anywhere this label is not going to work because you're not going to give it the kind of product that they want from it they are inescapably our partner in this and we've got it just became abundantly clear that we had entirely different concepts of what the business model for Paisley Park records should be and as a result the joint venture was doomed to fail so what's the roadkill gonna be and how is that going to affect prince in his future because at the end of the day I wasn't with them I was with him and I so I was concerned about how that was gonna play out and how it was going to affect him and because of the renegotiation of his own contract those concerns for Paisley Park Records kind of got pushed to the rear burner the changes that were happening at Warner Brothers in the early 90s and and came to a head in the mid 90s it was a power struggle at the top Warner Brothers had been the ultimate boutique label for a couple of decades since he late 60s early 70s under the under the regime of President lawston who was an older I think it was an accountant actually originally for Frank Sinatra in the 50s but Moe turned out to be possibly the most amazing and best and most effective if not necessarily the most successful record label president in history Warner Brothers had whole culture of that was very artists friendly and they just had hit after hit after hit after hit you know I mean Fleetwood Mac's tusk or sorry fluid Mac's rumours was you know was at the time the biggest selling record in history the Eagles greatest hits was also a Warner release that was the biggest selling release in history but owing mostly to egos I would say a power struggle was taking place at Warner Brothers where the three labels were Warner Brothers Elektra in Atlantic and ultimately over the next couple of years the top executive of Atlantic got promoted over Moe Austin and Mo was not accepting of that so this played out with you know costing the label millions and millions and millions of dollars over the next three years or so and I would say it's never really recovered from it and it's very sad because it was it they had the most successful record company in the world and they basically destroyed it it's interesting to know that when Warner Brothers started releasing prints material after prints had left the label there tends to be a bit of a correlation between when Prince's got his own project coming out and when Warner Brothers released their project so when Prince released emancipation under the symbol name Warner Brothers released chaos and disorder a sort of you know album from the Volks the prince had left them kind of under the Prince name to try and challenge the symbol brand natal and Prince release Ravan to the joy fantastic Warner Brothers released the vault old French for sale album and other compilation from the Volks and they sort of try and challenge what Prince is doing and you could also see that were best off so 93 they released the first best of and it gets a lot of rave reviews everyone talks about I think one quote was how this isn't just a world of pop this is a whole entire galaxy of popping consolidates Prince's career shows all the great things he's done and it draws attention away from the new stuff that he's trying to promote new stuff he's trying to put out again they do it in 2006 with ultimate prints came out at the same time as Prince ed 3121 album coming out on Universal so you could sort of see Warner Brothers kind of princes doing something they're trying to do something - maybe distract or at least sort of you know ride the coattails of whatever Prince is doing

Channel: The Prince Encyclopedia

Views: 1,181,704

Keywords: prince documentary, prince, slave trade, documentary

Id: gG1HE6KGswc

Length: 155min 21sec (9321 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020