Prince may be a musical visionary, but a technological visionary he's not.
In a rare interview with the Mirror, the recording artist behind such hits as "1999" and "Purple Rain" dismissed the Internet as a passing fad. "The internet's like MTV," Prince said. "At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, 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 agreed to the Mirror interview because the newspaper is exclusively giving away his latest album, 20TEN, with this coming week's Sunday edition. It's a pretty surreal story, and I recommend reading it in full for a glimpse of the aging pop star's bizarre lifestyle.
For our purposes, though, let's just look at Prince's claims about the Internet. "The internet's completely over," he said. "I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it."
Though Prince has adopted some unusual distribution methods for his recent work -- 2007's Planet Earth was packaged with British newspaper The Mail on Sunday, and 2009's Lotusflow3r was sold exclusively at Target in the United States -- he's staunchly opposed to digital distribution. In 2007, he sued YouTube, eBay and The Pirate Bay for illegally distributing his work.
Indeed, it's no longer possible to find Prince's music on YouTube, which led to a couple of extreme cases: After covering Radiohead's Creep at a music festival, Prince had fan-made YouTube videos removed, so even Radiohead couldn't see the performance. He also forced the takedown of a YouTube video that showed a toddler dancing to "Let's Go Crazy." This sparked a counter-suit that the toddler's mother eventually won.
Reading the entire profile, I'm not really shocked by anything Prince says. But I'm also saddened that, despite his decadent lifestyle, he prioritizes fighting piracy and getting advance payments over sharing his music with as many people as possible.
