This is what Prince is and always has been. It's not so much that he's an egotistical jerk...I mean he knows he is. He told us that years ago... The problem with prince venturing into long term commitments is he quickly gets bored. I"ve never paid for any of these online, long term deals because you must consider the source. It's clear this isn't some grand scheme by Prince to screw people. He goes into these endeavors with firm belief in what he's doing. As soon as it's completed he closes that chapter and moves on. Thus at the launch of the site and album he was already walking away from that project. That is who he is. It's made him great, frustrating, brilliant, maddening, a jackass and confounding. It's helped him by paving new roads and hurt him by closing doors on relationships and commitments- both business and personal. When Prince drops an album I buy the album and leave the other stuff alone.

the Prince I dig...naturally mysterious...no pretending.
i hope he sorts out his site, apparently he's upset many;
the solution is to simply let the music flow like sweet
honey...

love that hair on his chest. OooOOooo....good gawd. yep. baby cakes gotta keep that shirt closed. tease. lol.


but ..seriously folks.... I hope that he gets someone to run the site taht will actually manage the crew helping to run the site. someone who will check up on details and check up on fansites and actually DO their job... GO the extra mile without having to be told, begged, asked, or checked up on. a self starter that is actually interested in seeing a job well done and details actually looked after.

someone who will check up from the other direction to see how who ever is handling the customer care emails....( If it were me, i'd send email under the guise of a fan now and then my own self just to see what kind of response i get and how fans are being treated) I'd check up both ways... I hope the new team
leader will be on their J.O.B. and do it right. the site and the music and Prince and Prince fans deserve it.


i.e. i think the solution here ... is in the proper and competent, relilable management team.

just my 2 cents

Clay was bullshitting and that may be the reason why the site died.
This is all supposition but his words in the press confrences like 10 albums,live concerts, etc put him at odds with Prince because Prince may have been in it just for the Lotus content.

Your 2 cents only spend on Mars

H - E - L - L - O....earth to you

Once wooed by the Purple One, Clay found himself frozen out not long after the LotusFlow3r launch. He says at one point he was peppering Prince with so many e-mails about the site and its future that the singer called Clay and told him to cut it out.


Prince told him to STOP doing his job.

I'm not buying that. You don't just make things like that up, he got the ideas from somewhere. If it was just to promote the album, why have a membership in the first place, why not just have a shopping cart to buy the album/tshirt?

It was made clear that it was going to be 'a whole new universe'. It was going to be added to, and when Prince found out the low membership level, he thought 'fuck it', and let it die.

Hilarious because you know that if members came here raving about all the things they were getting, all the holdbacks would have joined.

Hilarious because you know that if members came here raving about all the things they were getting, all the holdbacks would have joined.

I'm not buying that. You don't just make things like that up, he got the ideas from somewhere. If it was just to promote the album, why have a membership in the first place, why not just have a shopping cart to buy the album/tshirt?

It was made clear that it was going to be 'a whole new universe'. It was going to be added to, and when Prince found out the low membership level, he thought 'fuck it', and let it die.

As for the unauthorized credit card charges, Clay said that he didn’t realize that their billing service had activated the automatic renewals. When he and his team saw the charges adding up -– and heard from irate members — they halted the process. He said “a few hundred” members had to be refunded.

I want everybody to pay attention to this statement.



Am I correct in saying that the credit card charges started this whole round of shit outside of the lack of new content???

I think you're right! so now how does this make it Prince's fault....as I said b4 Prince fired Clay's ass and Clay came out with this statement right at the time of Prince in cover of Ebony...June issue and guess what else Clay knew about the time it was to be leaked.

You post how/what you want, right?

By the way, can anybody dig up that article where either Clay or Malzone were talking about how they were gonna upload a dozen or so "unreleased" albums?

IIRC they claimed at the time they were preparing them for upload, yet based on this article it seems Clay never received anything beyond what is available at the site.

So now I'm curious as to what the original wording was wrt those albums.

Oh, and who was Malzone boasting about his work o... month ago, when it is now apparent that the site was over and done with then?

How much have Clay and Malzone lied about this whole thing?

I couldn't find it but I did find those reviews from the fans that were at the Lotusflow3r.com launch party at Prince's house that you mentioned a little while back and in them, they relate what was said that night in person by Clay and Malzone.

http://prince.org/msg/7/296514

http://prince.org/msg/7/296558

http://prince.org/msg/7/296614

Last year, a Los Angeleno named Scott Addison Clay was invited into Prince’s inner sanctum –literally. Clay recalls the pop singer leading him through “the catacombs of his insanely gargantuan basement.” The tour led into a cavernous room, where a man sat at a drum set. A woman picked up a bass, Prince strapped on a guitar and a private concert ensued. Clay said, “It was the most bizarre thing. I remember thinking, do we clap?”

These and other scenes that resemble a Dave Chappelle sketch come to life, including 2 a.m. pancakes and deafening listening sessions in a room lined with thick white fur (“It was like polar bears had laid down for him”), were all part of a run-up to the launch of Prince’s latest, greatest Web portal.

Clay and his team were from the marketing firm Cimarron Group, which develops interactive games and such for Hollywood films like “Twilight.” Prince had recruited them to build a platform for his upcoming three-album release. The result, LotusFlow3r.com, resembled a galactic aquarium, featuring doodads like a rotating orb that played videos. The promise: fans who ponied up $77 for a year-long membership would receive the three new albums, plus an ensuing flow of exclusive content, like unreleased tracks and archival videos.

A year later, LotusFlow3r has gone dark, thousands of Prince’s fans are very annoyed and Clay has been dismissed from Prince’s kingdom almost as abruptly as he was invited in.

A representative for Prince did not respond to request for comment.

The episode should serve as a warning to the growing number of artists experimenting with newfangled fan clubs and members-only content sites: feed the beast — feed it often and well — or suffer blowback from your most vocal fans.

Things in LotusFlow3r land boiled over last week when some members noticed that their credit cards had been charged an additional $77 — an automatic renewal of their memberships. Making matters worse, many of these members had previously contacted the site’s administrators to say they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth, and they wanted out when their year was up.

Prince fan sites lit up.

“So far I have paid another $77 for a floating jellyfish which vanishes when you click on it. Well done Prince. Nothing like treating your fans like royalty,” wrote OperatingThetan. Desire2006 added, “It looks like the [Better Business Bureau] will have 2 re-open its ‘Prince’ case file again!!!!!”

To his credit, the singer was a Web pioneer, having released an album online back in 1997 following his ugly contract dispute with Warner Bros. But his track record with online fan clubs has been spotty. In 2006, he abruptly shuttered his New Power Generation Music Club with the message, “In its current 4m there is a feeling that the NPGMC gone as far as it can go.”

Last week, some fans seemed to blame themselves for getting roped in. “I signed up again, knowing full well what happened to his past Web sites,” wrote IstenSzek.

Prince fan Steven Anthony, who was erroneously charged and then refunded, called attention to the fracas — and got a lot of hate from diehard Prince fans — with a scathing open letter to the singer on his blog. Anthony says he was “lucky” to get what he did out of his membership, including a T-shirt and access to tickets for a concert at Paisley Park in Minnesota. But Anthony still feels burned by the LotusFlow3r experience. He says, “I don’t really like Prince that much as a person right now, but I still support his work.”

After the hyped launch of LotusFlow3r.com, Prince became an absentee landlord, Clay said. “We only got stuff in dribs and drabs.” Clay declined to say how many paying members the site did attract, but he speculated that the number was a disappointment to Prince.

As for the unauthorized credit card charges, Clay said that he didn’t realize that their billing service had activated the automatic renewals. When he and his team saw the charges adding up -– and heard from irate members — they halted the process. He said “a few hundred” members had to be refunded.

Once wooed by the Purple One, Clay found himself frozen out not long after the LotusFlow3r launch. He says at one point he was peppering Prince with so many e-mails about the site and its future that the singer called Clay and told him to cut it out. About a month ago, Prince relayed the order for the site to be shut down. Now Clay is in the process of handing over LotusFlow3r.com files to a new Prince representative who Clay describes as “me 2.0.”

He and his team were paid for their work, he said, but they never had a written contract. Looking back on an experience for which Prince fans “praised and reviled me, in equal measure,” Clay said, “it was a wild year.”

There were emails with basic questions that were simply ingorned.
Email gone unanswered.
And that is SOLELY the web development teams fault.

I think he got paid and started partying. while the cats away the mouse will play as they say. And now he comes back trying to save face....blaming Prince
for not delivering enough content to throw up on the site.

what we don't know is how true that is or not. What we do know is that Clay did not do his job. Period.

What we also do know is that Prince obviously did deliver material to put up on the site.

We don't know how much more of it was delivered to Clay and Clay simply dropped the ball.

This post is hysterical.