Geeklawyer really wanted to dislike the new Prince Album since height challenged one went mad in the ’90’s, changed his name to a short Perl script and stubbornly refused to deliver a worthy successor to ‘Little Red Corvette’.
On the other hand any musician who pisses off music industry retailers record labels and other pompous arses who think musicians owe them a living gets his thumbs up.
For those of you with a life the summary is this: Prince has done that which is unheard of (?) and released his new album by CD on the cover of the Mail on Sunday before other media/stores.
Which way to swing this post?
‘Planet Earth’ is particularly fine (it has the lyric “Imagine you could rid the world of anyone you choose” — that caused Geeklawyer to drift off for an hour or two of idle sick fantasising involving entire swathes of humanity). ‘Lion of Judah’ is obscenely fine and should become the new national anthem. The other tracks are fair, none suck.
Geeklawyer may revisit Prince on the strength of this album.
See? See that, stupid record labels? free (and, specifically, Free) stuff works.
Geeklawyer was, of course, hideously embarrassed to be seen with the Mail on Sunday in his hands.
According to The Economist’s report on it Prince earns more from live shows than anything else. What’s most surprising though is that he was the music industry’s top earner in 2004.
Clearly the pre-recorded music industry are worried. I guess also worried are musicians who suddenly find they’ll have to get out and do some work for a change rather than just hanging out in a studio for a few months every couple of years.
My musicians I know love live work but complain that making money out of gigs is very hard. They tend to regard it as promo for the album.
Of course for the heavyweights like Ponce, er, Elton John Cliff Richard (yea — I’m taking the piss) etc. that may be different. But for small bands it looks like there is an issue: they can’t make money of the music and can’t pull a large enough crowd to make gigging pay.
Couldn’t agree more. I remember from my own days of gigging around London that it was great fun, but paid very poorly (we were OK, but not brilliant — not without our fans though).
I think that doing concerts as the main income for the wide middle tier of bands is probably good. Below that you have to build your following and it’s only (not that it’s easy) a matter of building the numbers of those who come to see you perform. Above that they’re so rich right now it probably doesn’t matter if they never make another penny.
The more money you can make running with the same business model the easier it is for the artists. So if you can start your career and maximise it doing the same thing this is great. That Prince is able to use this model and outperform the traditional earners is a very important data point.
What it seems to mean is that there is a transition cost (rather than benefit) from being a “live” performer/band to being a “studio” performer. If you cannot perform then it seems that now you won’t make the money that people who are good performers can make.
The problem comes if song writers cannot also monetise their song writing ability. That really will make us all culturally poorer because the best song writers and the best performers aren’t often the same people.
I welcome the change towards artists making more money in live gigs than sold records. Hopefully there is still an economic model for the song writers as well.
Damnit, I’m just too principled to buy the Daily Mail. I blagged the disk off my friendly local corner shop owner instead.
Oddly the last Mail on Sunday had had its CD nicked; errr what town do you live in
Of course, being a lawyer I eat babies, so buying the MoS doesn’t present much of a moral quandary.