Prince needs to buy an ad slot or two during today's SuperBowl and launch the site simultaneously. I think this is sound marketing.

- enormous global audience who could instantaneously, or at some time in the future, login and buy music direct from the website, no middlemen
- immense credibility having killed it at the Superbowl two years ago
- He certainly has the dough
- Lotusflow3r is a nice fit for the demographic, the other two albums would be gravy
[Edited 2/1/09 8:03am]

At the cost of a 30 second SuperBowl spot, he couldn't recoup the investment.

The Kid ain't packin' 'em in like he used to.

The entry price for a 30-second Super Bowl this year is $3 million.

Spending $3 million to advertise his website would be the dumbest move Prince could make.

Genesia said:

Let's do the math.

Lets assume a revenue expectation of $20 per sale over time - if he also offers a subscription model I think that is very conservative.

To break even that is only 150,000 transactions out of an estimated 140 million global audience. .1% conversion over time.

Add to that the value of signup email addresses who do not buy anything originally but can be marketed to down the road for services, concert tickets, broadcasts etc.

And, if Prince was shrewd he would call in some chits on his 06 performance to help secure discounted spots available due to canceled advertiser commitments.
3 million is the retail price, this is not a retail year.

I'm gonna be real... his paying customers already know about him.


can't see it being a good investment.. they would just go to best buy and buy his greatest hits.

2funkE said:

They aren't going to give him a discount on ad prices because he performed in '07. (It was '07 - not '06.)

Let's say he did do it. People flood his website during/after the game. What would they see? A TV screen that displays butterflies and a flying "symbol." Three cassettes with songs they've never heard of.

Yeah - that'll rope 'em in.

Genesia said:

The full site is complete and would be uploaded right before the ad ran.
It just seems a little too coincidental that it may launch on Super Bowl Sunday.
Why compete with it? Seems to make more sense to have it tied into the event to capitalize on the captive audience.

You are right, far fetched, but not that far fetched.

Go Daddy.com built their company on a Super Bowl ad.

Sdldawn said:

And give a big % of the cd price to Best Buy...not P's style if he can help it. Maybe after he has milked the full margin strategy of distributing direct

with that webdomain name? nobody will be able to remember it, since the 3
is in the name.

would you remember it if you caught a 30 second clip of say springsteen
on tv for a website called radionowh3re.com?

the only smart marketing thing he should have done years and years ago
was secure the domain prince.com with a whole host of different things
linking to it like album names or princeandtherevolution, npg etc etc.

not a lot of casual fans and no as of yet non fans can find this site.
if you search for "prince official site" on google the only thing that
shows up is 3121.com on the second page of results, which, guess what
doesn't even link to the new site.

an advertisement on tv is no good if the domainname is illogical and
can't be hammered home crystal clear in the short time of the ad.

IstenSzek said:

Valid point on the domain.

The problem with this type of advertisement is exactly as pointed out -- if done all people would do is be inspired to pick up "The Very Best of Prince" or "Ultimate", not wait for a new album...

i stand corrected. if you type in "prince official website" on google
you now get no result at all that leads you to any official site that
he has or had in the past.

and yet he wants a place like housequake to take down a banner cause
people might think it's an official site if they visit it.

StevenAnthony said:

wich is another thing i never quite understood. he was very upset over
warners releasing the very best of prince and later someone else put
together that other one with his and extended versions. they all sold
pretty well iirc.

the very best of sold more than a million even.

so why doesn't he release his own updated hits collection? he said he'd
rerecorded his entire catalogue so he would only have to put those cuts
on a single disc or a 2 disc package and release it himself.

now that he could market. put info about later releases and a website
in the booklet to the hits album. wet people's appetites for more.

OP, sorry, it would be 'cool', but i disagree with you.

What strikes me about Princes career after he left Warners, that he (at least commercialy) could have fared so much better (I think), when he had just kept himself to the basic ingredients of properly promoting a new album.

That means: releasing at least 3 (of the more catchy) songs on single, creating attractive video's for those songs and properly 'plugging' and promoting those new songs/video's and the album they came from.

I wont focus on the second half of the nineties, because that was obviously a period for him to experimentate with the way he 'delivered' his music, but when you look at the period that started with his grammy-performance with Beyonce, his Rock and roll hall of fame performance, and the release of the album Musicology, you could say he was purposely aiming for a comeback in the mainstream.

With Musicology he did started good: a high-budget video for the title track, and a 'big hits' tour all over the states.

But with 3121 things allready started to falter: Black Sweat was seen as one of his strongest singles in years, but he did follow it up way too late with the poorly promoted single/video Fury.
An even bigger mistake: a song with such hit-potential as 'Love' was never issued as a single (with a strong, high-budget video).

When it came to Planet Earth, his promotion did seem to get more confusing: giving the album away for free at a newspaper, was that really the most convincing move?
Next to that: the first single, Guitar, was only available through verizon, while potential singles like The One U wanna C and Chelsea Rodgers (which both could have been hits in my opinion), were promoted very poorly.
It felt like: i have released this new album now, oh shit... I have to do some promotion too...

You can say about Prince what you want, but a strong 'businessman' he isnt.

And, IMO he shows it again right now: starting a website with only the proposed name of a new album. Like people who are casually interested in his music are going to find that site?

Riverpoet31 said:

and why did the complete video for "guitar" never get a decent shot at tv?

was it ever released in any official capacity?

the snippet of it in the verizon ad was funny and looked great. it would
have pushed the song a lot further than it ended up going imo.

Prince doesn't need that, that's what the org is for.

2funkE said:

The advertising would be local, not global.

Plus, it's hardly a big deal over here, the halftime show makes bigger headlines than the game itself - it's shown at something like 4am when only sports nerds and drunks would even see it.

NouveauDance said:

true, in all my 30 years i have never seen a single second of superbowl
footage on tv. not on any dutch, english, german, belgian or french tv
channel.

heck i haven't even caught any of it on the multiple american news or
information channels we have over here.

Riverpoet31 said:

I agree completely. People on the org often say Prince does not owe us anything, which I agree with, but goodness gracious ....

To me it is just very disrespectful to your fan base to put on a website that a "new galaxy" is coming January 2009, with videos, new music etc and then drop what he did.