I don't necessarily regret joining the first time around because no one made me any clear promises as to what I should expect from the site. I think a lot of us (or me anyway) figured it might be like NPGMC where we'd get releases and such. But I wasn't promised any of that, so that's on my.

To fuckin charge me for another go at nothing is plain donkey turds.

Gav said:

what a JOKE....U know prince got housequake shut down N here U r acting as a go between...if U had any morals U would tell P 2 go F off after closing housequake...dont b a sucker 4 life...B a true funk soldier...

WOLFY

FunkyDissCo said:

Yes, but they won't refund anyone that incurs overdraft fees which, in most cases, are going to be roughly half of the Lotus membership cost.

Prince is shady, ya'll.

Genesia said:

To Prince, His Purple Majesty, His Royal Badness, The Dick Formerly Known As Prince:

Today, a year after opening your LotusFlow3r club, you charged fans who had requested to cancel their annual memberships another $77. How do I know? Because I am one of them.

Prince, you’ve gotta cut this shit out. I’m a big fan, I drove 15 hours to see you last year. I own all of your albums, movies, and lots of other memorabilia. Yeah, I’m a fan. But would it kill you to treat your fans correctly for once? When you first announced your new LotusFlower club, many more experienced fans said “don’t do it, Prince has a baaaaad history in the online marketplace. I went ahead and signed up anyway, gladly paying the $77 because of all the things you and your team mentioned would eventually be coming to the site. Exclusive content, rare material, possibly even long-awaited releases from your vault. Instead we got a spinning orb of videos, three albums (which were available at Target for less than $12), four “new” streaming tracks and if fans were lucky, they actually received the t-shirt you promised. Luckily I got my shirt, but from reading what’s available on the internet, I’d say anywhere from 30-40% did NOT get their shirts.

The worst part is, several months ago I sent a request to your support/sales group at LotusFlow3r requesting to cancel my membership. I never received a reply, so I went into the site and changed my credit card information. I figured that surely that would be enough. I knew that the site auto-charged every year, but the terms stated that you had to email support@lotusflower.com, which many, many fans did. Instead of a reply, we all woke up with nice little $77 charges this morning. The best part? As of the time of this writing — your website is actually down, and completely inaccessible.

Part of me wants to hope that you have something bigger planned. But that makes it sound like I’m drinking the purple Kool-Aid, which I’m not. I just want my $77 back, please. If you can show me that you have better things coming, I would even possibly consider rejoining the site, but I don’t want to pay $77 for a black page.

Please stop being a giant purple dick,

-Steven Anthony Hammock

(To all readers, I will keep you posted on this story. Word has it that a statement from P. and his team is coming soon, but I’m in a kind of “see it to believe it” mood. Hopefully a statement really is coming.)

No "pending" or complete charge is on my bank account (yet), so I just called my bank and got them to cancel my debit card and issue me with a new one - Hopefully that should put the mockers on any "rebilling" overnight (as I said, I'm in the UK - so I don't know if I joined on the 25th or the 26th "Lotu$Fiasco.CON"-time, last year.) If any of you have escaped the rebilling so far, I recommend doing the same.

irishwolfhound said:

1) Prince didn't close Housequake at all - Aaron just didn't find it fun to run any more - HIS choice, not Prince's

2) This is about the only way that fans who've paid their hard-earned can find out what's happening. Yes I could have told P to F-Off but that would have hurt the fans, not him. Anyone that's met me or talked to me in the 24 years that I've been involved in the P community would know I only do what I do for the fans, not for P.

A "sucker 4 life" would be someone that buys over-priced Dublin tickets from a "fan" that keeps insisting a gig is on when it's clearly not.

N2thelight said:

You know what tho?
I get it, that big stars are like any other big business where the boss/owner cannot possibly SEE every detail of all that is going on. BUT....your OFFICIAL music site is a pretty big deal.
He can't be excused from everything.
If he truly didn't know, then that's still just a different kind of shitty on his part.

Those whom haven't yet been charged...

Couldn't you just report to your bank, that your credit or debit cards are lost and you need a replacement?

The new cards would have new expiry dates and a new 3-digit code on the back, wouldn't they?

FunkyDissCo said:

Oops, sorry guys. Just got an orgnote from the mods, of course that's NOT a real message i got. Just to make it clear: I made that up, but of course it's a bit misleading in the current situation. It was meant to be funny, i thought it was obvious i wrote that, but ok... Sorry for that.
[Edited 3/25/10 13:09pm]

fantasticjoy said:

co-sign ...

I wonder how much involvement P has/had in "any" of the sites.

PurpleLove7 said:

I wonder why Prince should never have to take any responsibility of any sort when shit like this happens?

Gav said:

In all fairness Gav, do you think that your efforts for the "fans" has actually panned out?

unique said:

SORRY?!

Negs said:

Be careful, it's still legal to charge to cancelled debit cards. I got caught like this myself once.

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

I try to help, I can't exactly cause miracles !

Seriously though, there's been many times that my efforts have panned out but it's like a roller-coaster ride.

Right now, I am making fans feeling known very loud and clear to the people that matter.

At least I'm trying.

Gav said:

Not if you have written to cancel your Lotu$Fiasco account and have proof that you cancelled, it isn't.

irishwolfhound said:

1) Prince didn't close Housequake at all - Aaron just didn't find it fun to run any more - HIS choice, not Prince's

2) This is about the only way that fans who've paid their hard-earned can find out what's happening. Yes I could have told P to F-Off but that would have hurt the fans, not him. Anyone that's met me or talked to me in the 24 years that I've been involved in the P community would know I only do what I do for the fans, not for P.

A "sucker 4 life" would be someone that buys over-priced Dublin tickets from a "fan" that keeps insisting a gig is on when it's clearly not.

Why don't you all leave him alone. $144 is not much to see some videos that were made in the 80s and download a song that is available all over the net to download for free. The fact that the site has faded to black is also no big deal (well there is still an orb there), it's isn't like he's suddenly just stepped away from a website before with no announcement and left the screen black. And as for t-shirts, they were only for founding members. If you haven't found the content then you ar not a founding member, just a member.

Negs said:

I meant in general. Obviously on this one you've got grounds to argue the charge.

...

When y'all originally signed up and entered your credit card info, your information went to Prince's merchant account processors and it was on file with THEM. Their job is to process his site's subscriptions when they are due and that is exactly what they did.

...

I posted an "open letter" to Prince on my site:

i'm not even that upset, really. like someone said to me before on another
thread, i signed up again, knowing full well what happened to his past web
sites. so i'll just see what happens now. if nothing comes into being, i'm
just gonna see to it that i get my money back.

but i can see how this is going to infuriate a lot of people to the point
of no return. if there's no year 2 and they're gonna have to see to it the
money is reverted back to the people they're charging now, it's going to
be a massive cock up once again.

kinda like the original crystal ball fiasco, but magnified times 10.

only way to get people to calm down now would be if the site opened up at
noon tomorrow and had 100 unreleased tracks from 1979-2000 on it, ready
for download.

anything less than that, and i'd be shitting my pants right now if i were
prince. there must be some crazy angry people out there right now.