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PrintableAerogram said: metalorange said: Well, the contract was only 100 million as long as Prince kept selling in large numbers - 5 million per album. Otherwise the money dropped right down each album that didn't sell that big. This was just after Diamonds & Pearls which sold 5 million copies and Prince thought he could sustain that level. He was wrong, his record sales went down and down. He blamed Warners for not promoting him correctly amongst other things. A lot of the people he had been working with at Warners left and he didn't get on with the new executives. The deal seemed great - 100 million?! Who wouldn't! If everything had gone the way Prince imagined it, he would have been on top of the world - but in hindsight, he made a mistake. I kind of feel, back then he was totally into the music and left the business small-print to others. Since that contract came back to bite him, he became obsessed with the business side of the music industry, not wanting to be caught out again, which continues to the present. It's amazing to realize he made half of the value of that multi-album contract in 2004. Not just in record sales, of course, but ultimately "freedom" did pay off handsomely. Yeah, though obviously he got most of the money from the concert ticket sales. He's always had the ability to make money from concerts - Warners wouldn't have got a penny from those, I believe. The Lovesexy tour was such an expensive production, it only just broke even - but these days, Prince seems to have learnt from his mistakes and keeps the production costs down. | |
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NPGman said: Amen, Brother.....now if you can only get Amyhr to open up his windbag and read this, the ORG would be alot better off....WORD!!! LOL.....nice one Jester!!! [Edited 4/9/05 13:02pm]  -->> This Space 4 Rent <<--
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metalorange said: Aerogram said: It's amazing to realize he made half of the value of that multi-album contract in 2004. Not just in record sales, of course, but ultimately "freedom" did pay off handsomely. Yeah, though obviously he got most of the money from the concert ticket sales. He's always had the ability to make money from concerts - Warners wouldn't have got a penny from those, I believe. The Lovesexy tour was such an expensive production, it only just broke even - but these days, Prince seems to have learnt from his mistakes and keeps the production costs down. You are correct, metalorange, unless WB gave an advance on album recording costs, they could not touch touring money. I am MrVictor.... | |
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Mindflux said: It always amazes me, the kinda comments that come from people when we start talking about the whole contract issue - you know, he shoulda known this, shoulda known that, he knew what he was signing, doesn't everyone read contracts? WTF??!!!!
All so holier than thou and "my shit don't stink"!! The fact is people the world over get fucked by contracts, small print and legal terminology. But, none of you lot, eh? Never made a mistake in your lives have you? Another fact is he is a MUSICIAN. Not a lawyer, not an executive, not a suit! And, as a musician it is unlikely that he was/is familiar with the masses of legal shit that go with signing with one of the world's largest companies. People expect so much of him. Nobody here would even be offered the chance to negotiate a $100,000,000 contract, yet people seem to be so confident in knowing that they wouldn't have made such apparently obvious mistakes. Did you ever read every bit of your employment contract? Without skipping the bits that look the same as everyone elses? Ever read all the print that came with that loan application? Always read the End-user Licence agreement with every bit of software you download? - some of you need to get a reality check and get off your fucking faux pedastal! Exactly. Prince re-signed, and in a sense he has no-one to blame but himself. But who checks the small print? The lawers do that. It's not as if the new Warners contract was unusual or particularly oppressive. Non-ownership of masters wasn't an issue at that time because it was common practice. It wasn't until later that the implications of these things became clear, and that's when he started to realise what he'd signed away... and what most artists sign away. From what I heard Prince's issue with master ownership wasn't a problem until he started using samples of his old songs in new recordings and discovered that he had to pay WB to sample his own material! he then dug deeper and realised that there were other issues linked to the ownership of your own masters as well. This all came at a time when almost all of the WB execs he had a good relationship with left and he was faced with a new bunch of suits who were all about the business rather than the music. It's just unfortunate that Prince wasn't aware of all this before he re-signed in '92 as at that point he could have settled for less money and negotiated the perfect contract for his needs and what he saw as 'right'. WB aren't really the bad guys in all this, their partnership with Prince up to that point had been very beneficial. And you can't blame Prince for bad business decisions as these kind of contracts were the norm. I do think it's a great shame that Prince and WB couldn't come to a mutually beneficial re-negotiation as I do think they managed to curb some of Prince's excesses and produce a consistently high quality end product. Whereas left to his own devices, Prince became very inconsistent and the quality of his output suffered. | |
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Why is everyone surprised that prince aloud WB to have the masters.
90% of the artist out there don't own their masters. | |
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