On Prince vs. the Internet

Between Bowie and Prince, 2016 has been a rough year for effeminate-masculine outré artiste-types--the Venn Diagram of those two fanbases overlaps much more than I realized.  Yet though David Bowie's death hit me far harder than I ever though it would, unlike many of my peers, I confess that Prince's passing initially left me somewhat detached.  All I could really remember of him was "1999", some lame Jay Leno monologues about "The Artist Formally Known As", and an off-hand Simpsons reference to "When Doves Cry."

And part of that, frankly, was Prince's fault: before his tragic passing, the most common complaint leveled against him was how utterly impossible it was to find his music, well, anywhere online.  YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, even dedicated fan-sites, were all scrubbed clean of even the slightest hint of his music.  He was notorious for sicking he lawyers within hours upon any website naive enough to post any form of his music, even karoke covers.

Such, to say the least, is not how people discover music nowadays.  You have to be able to stumble upon videos on YouTube, goes the argument, or playlists on streaming services, for folks to even have a chance of knowing you exist, let alone deciding if they want to hear more.  Sure, Prince was mega-popular in the '80s, but you can't coast on 30-year-old notoriety for the rest of your life, cried the critics; there is now an entire new generation of music listeners who are utterly ignorant of Prince.  And who can blame them, if they can't even accidentally hear snippets of his hits?

Prince, for however forward-thinking he may have been artistically, nevertheless became an absolute dinosaur--an archaic, analog relic of some bygone, pre-digital age, unwilling to adapt to or even understand the internet at all.

So goes the argument.

Or, did he instead understand the internet all too well?

I'm thinking for example of the famed 2012 Pitchfork article by Damon Krukowski, about how the thousands of streams his band Galaxie 500 has gotten on Spotify has netted him a grand whole dollar--that in fact selling a single t-shirt at a show generates bigger profit for him than his entire catalogue on streaming.  I'm also thinking of how Thom Yorke of Radiohead has removed all his solo work from Spotify, over similar complaints.  And how mega-sellers Adele and Taylor Swift have recently chosen not to debut their latest releases on streaming either, claiming solidarity with the struggling young musicians denied their first means of support.  There appears to be this slowly growing consensus among musicians, from the lowliest indie rocker to the biggest stadium-filler, that this whole model of getting paid jack-all for their recordings is, well, a clearly bad deal.

And I also recall that Spotify and other streaming services have been trying to negotiate paying even less out to artists, in large part because they can't afford to pay out more--it appears that this whole streaming business model is fundamentally unprofitable and unsustainable.

Which brings me back to Prince: was he simply an old dude afraid of change, or did he perceive with crystal clarity, years before everyone else caught on, the existential threat that streaming poses to musicians?  Was he shooting himself in the foot with all his anti-internet litigiousness, or did he do the cold, hard arithmetic and determine (long before Damon Krukowski) that having a tiny, die-hard cult-following pay actual money for his albums still netted him more profit than letting millions of casual fans stream his whole back catalogue for free?

For what it's worth, the day he died, I did in fact exchange real money for a greatest hits album, wherein I immediately discovered why so many of my friends mourned--his songs are just so undeniably fun!  There's something living about them, and they awake something living within you as well!  It is with a twinge of sadness that I realize it took his untimely death for me to finally give him a second thought.

But though I still think him scrubbing even his videos from YouTube was rather much, I think I now better sympathize with the logic behind it: I suspect that is wasn't so much that Prince stumbled on the home-stretch with his forward-thinking, so to speak, but that in fact his forward-thinking became so sharply honed near the end that we mistook it for blindness--that in fact we are only now catching up with him, that he well foresaw the havoc that these so-called "disruptive" new business models would wreak upon content producers, as they already have upon oh so many other fields (including mine), further stratifying the rich from the poor, the investors from the actual workers.

Prince, though popular enough that he probably still could have made a small fortune off of streaming alone, perhaps determined that he would have no part in such an exploitative system--he refused to be complicit, and so recused himself from participating altogether.

And now that he is gone, we perhaps need to carry on his work ourselves, and refuse to be complicit as well.