So this week, while all the blogosphere was abuzz about George Michael‘s SEVENTH car crash, LeAnn Rimes‘ controversial canoodling pics with boyfriend Eddie Cibrian, Crystal Bowersox‘s new teeth, Liz Phair‘s credibility-killing new musical direction, and the Grammys’ revised eligibility rules, the World Wide Web itself was under attack by Prince, aka The Artist Formerly Known As The Internet’s Biggest Supporter. Yes, online readers, according to His Purple Majesty’s new royal decree, the Internet is kaput. Over. Finished. You may as well turn off this website and go back to your abacus now.
“The Internet’s completely over,” Prince declared to England’s Daily Mirror, sounding like he’s ready to party not quite like it’s 1999, but more like ’79. “I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else [digitally]. They won’t pay me an advance for it, and then they get angry when they can’t get it….All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”
Prince’s rejection of all thing Interweb came as quite a shock, considering that the man was once seemingly completely besotted with the digital revolution. For a man who very publicly battled with his record label, Warner Bros., because he wanted to release more product than Warner was willing to, a guy with hundreds of unreleased songs under his purple belt, it seemed like the perfect means to get all that music to the fans, eliminating the middleman.
So after Prince escaped from the clutches of Warner Bros. in the mid-’90s, he released a series of increasingly little-heard albums on his own label, NPG Records–some of which were only available through (you guessed it) the Internet. And even as recently as March 2009, Prince was introducing a heavily promoted new subscription website, LotusFlow3r.com; for an annual membership of $77, fans would theoretically not only get the digital version of the three-CD set he was releasing through Target at that time, but loads of new and unreleased material unavailable anywhere else. But as the Wall Street Journal reported this past April, the website turned out to be a bust, at least for the disgruntled followers who never got the stream of rarities and bonuses they were expecting. And just as the mercurial Prince put the kibosh on his New Power Generation Music Club subscription site back in 2006, early this year he gave the order for the LotusFlow3r.com site to be shut down as well.
And now it seems like Prince wants ALL sites to be shut down–including iTunes!
