sign o' the times

Prince wanted to have a pop at iTunes, they won't give him no advance. He probably hasn't caught up to the fact that in recorded music these days it seems that hardly anyone gets paid. Except for Prince, of course.

You'll wonder why Prince's last two UK releases were free CDs with national daily newspapers. There are probably two reasons for this - a) it gets his music into the hands of more people than it would if he was releasing a paid-for album, and b) he probably gets paid more as a result.

The ways that artists are paid for recorded music is quite complicated, and not something I can easily explain. (If you want to know about mechanical royalties or cross collateralisation read Passman). No doubt you've heard them all bleating about it in the past, some with justification and others without. Prince got paid for these albums; he got paid quickly and handsomely. He got traction for songs that may otherwise have been ignored, so even if he does think the internet is dead you can be sure that he's not stupid, like I said - he's a genius.

Now the numbers are in we all know that the Daily Mirror increased its circulation by 27% on the day of the Prince cover-mount, which amounts to 379,000 extra copies. For Prince it means that within one day there were 1.6 million people in the UK who had a copy of his new album. The hottest artists on the planet would struggle to sell those numbers worldwide in a day.

It's not to say that they listened to it, and if they did they may have been disappointed (as I was). The problem with genius is that no-one can tell it what to do. Prince is prolific - 33 albums in 32 years is way in excess of most other recording artists, I can't think of another successful act that comes anywhere near, especially if you take into account that some of these albums were doubles and even triples.

Prolific artists are such because they're productive - if you combine that productivity with 'genius' what you tend to find is that they have no edit facility, and once they get to this stage of their career there are few people who can tell them what to do. Prince has always written and performed and recorded, it's what he does - as such it's his day-job and no-one wants to do their job for free.

Does Prince envisage himself as a shill to sell copies of a newspaper, or a vibrant artist working to share his music with as wide an audience as possible whilst still getting paid? Whatever critics and the public may say, Prince knows it's one of the above and you may think it's the other, just remember that he's a genius and it may cause you to re-appraise that thought.