I think Prince should have done more to promote his first ever official live album. One appearance on Jay Leno probably didn't have much impact on sales.

Why weren't there any magazine interviews? How about making some public appearances at award shows or something so that the general public will know that he's still around and making music.

His first live album and only a few thousand club members get to hear it. Is he trying to be an underground or cult artist

Do you have any official figures concerning the sales?

I think it is a bit early to retrospect, but it is interesting anyway

Really, I don't think he cares much about selling this box-set a lot through retail. The NPGMC membership-fees covered both production-costs and profit margin...trust me!

deMatthijs said:

I don't have any official sales figures, but it doesn't seem to be that high. I didn't see anybody mention seeing the live set in the Billboard Top 100 or anything when it was released.

It just seems so anti-climatic for him to wait over 20 years into his career to release a live album and then just mail it out to die-hards and not even try to get anyone else interested

Well maybe our expectations aren't those of Prince's.



- The Enemy Is You

abierman said:

Who told you that, Catherine Glover???!!!

ConsciousContact said:

Well, don't all artists want to have good sales


He won't be able to keep up his lifestyle if his sales and fanbase gets so small that he becomes an underground cult artist.

It's NOT too soon to retrospect the publicity junket on this release.

You're right, NORMALLY, there's appearances you make to pimp the record, and you go ANYPLACE that'll give you the time of day. In the past, on his more commercial releases, (last one that comes to mind was RAVE) he had full-page ads all over the place, posters in wrecka stowes, and folks was talking about it.

He doens't have the publicity $$ (I GUESS, but who are we kidding here) to go run ads in every music publication, but dayamn, an appearance on Tom Joiner's morning show would reach a GIGANTIC audience.

So, no, in retrospect, you can look to see what he did to pimp the release of this record, because it's already released. The publicity shoulda gone on four months ago, and really, what did he do? Send out some emails, put a few mentions on HIS OWN WEBSITE.

I think folks woulda bought this if they knew about it.
[This message was edited Wed Feb 12 10:50:48 PST 2003 by otan]

NikkiDarling said:

I don't know. You'd have to ask Prince. Rave didn't sell that much, the Rainbow Children didn't sell much. I guess he made a lot from the tours. Don't know how much he makes from his club. Don't know if his lifestyle has changed in the last few years because of monetary considerations. I suppose that you could say at the end of the day, I don't know

abierman said:

Thank you.

He doesn't care about sales as far as i can tell. Frankly, i don't either. i got mine.

I'm not in the music industry, but I don't think that artists make that much off of sales. The record companies take so much of the money that the artist really is only getting 50 cents or less from each CD sold.

A lot of artists make their money off of touring and licensing/merchandise/marketing their image. Britney Spears made a fortune by licensing her image to watch companies, toy companies, doing TV commercials etc.

I think that big name performers, like Whitney Houston, make their money off of multi-million dollar contracts so they get paid X amount regardless of whether they sell 1 million CDs or 2 million CDs.

He should do a "Living with Prince" documentary like MJ; even the bad publicity MJ got from that one benefited the sales of his albums by as much as 500% from the previous weeks...