scorp84 said:

Because $100 MIL looks and sounds really good in the papers lol. The only stipulation was that he pretty much had to sell "Purple Rain" numbers on subsequent releases to really reap the benefits of the contract he signed.

That pretty much summarizes it. Everything else was and is folklore.

He wanted a better deal than Madonna back in 1992. And on paper it was.

After the success of Diamonds & Pearls selling 6.4 million copies world wide at the time, almost 7 million to date...

Warners signed Prince to a $100 million contract and his albums had to surpass the 5 million mark in sales in order to be granted a $10 million advance per album...

Obviously the first album on the new contract Love Symbol failed to deliver selling less than 2 million worldwide and that's when it all hit the fan.

prince must of been deluded/ignorant to think every preceeding album afer D&P would sell 5million! also the pressure he would put himself under to create hit after hit would of been impossible, especially after the way he spurned the 'mountain top' after the success of PR and he made AWIAD.

strangely i think Symbol could of been bigger if the PR campaign and single releases etc were better co-ordinated. maybe the songs were not strong enough: My Name Is Prince wasn't a brilliant single (bit cheesy/arrogant), Sexy MF (to rude for mainstream), 7 (a great song but what's it all about?) and the segues on the album didn't really make a lot of sense. i suppose TMBGITW was a bit late to the party but i could see this song on Symbol, and it would of sold the album 5 million+

[Edited 10/29/14 15:51pm]

iZsaZsa said:

Instead of 10 million dollars what did he get instead?

That only he and WB knows for sure but as I seem to recall hearing reported at the time, he got somewhere near 30 million dollars when he signed that contract.

The way I recall it, the issue wasn't initially money. It was the fact that Prince had flooded the market with duds and WB felt he was losing his touch/focus. WB wanted him to hold back on new albums so that they could release a greatest hits package. That's what kicked off the shit. Prince later framed the issue as money, likely, because it put WB in the worst light possible and kept the issue off his questionable releases. But really it was about Warner's saying "no" to new releases.

Dandroppedadime said:

I think Symbol could of been bigger if the PR campaign and single releases etc were better co-ordinated. maybe the songs were not strong enough: My Name Is Prince wasn't a brilliant single (bit cheesy/arrogant), Sexy MF (to rude for mainstream), 7 (a great song but what's it all about?)

I agree.I love this album,but I think they (Prince and/or Warners) screwed up on the singles.

"7" should have been the first single,followed by "The Continental".

"And God Created Woman" should have been the third single (instead of the uneventful "Morning Papers").

With those three singles leading the way,I bet the album would have done much better.

HatrinaHaterwitz said:

funksterr said:

funksterr said:

The way I recall it, the issue wasn't initially money. It was the fact that Prince had flooded the market with duds and WB felt he was losing his touch/focus. WB wanted him to hold back on new albums so that they could release a greatest hits package. That's what kicked off the shit. Prince later framed the issue as money, likely, because it put WB in the worst light possible and kept the issue off his questionable releases. But really it was about Warner's saying "no" to new releases.

Exactly... And the refusal of releases was all due after the Love Symbol didn't live up to expectations.

The bad choices for singled with My Name Is Prince and Sexy MF, as well as poor marketing.

Muscially we all agree Love Symbol is a strong album, but it wasn't promoted wisely like D&P was. Also Prince always has the same problem, he never lets the success of an album simmer, due to his genius. He always wants to go to the next album, same thing he did with Purple Rain, Batman and D&P commercially his biggest albums... Not talking about the musical content but the follow ups to those albums ATWIAD, Graffiti Bridge, Love Symbol always lost it's commercial momentum because he was so quick to release another album.

MattyJam said:

Was it after Love Symbol failed to repeat the success of D&P? I remember watching the Oprah interview from 96 and Prince saying his deal with WB turned out to be "less than lucrative"... And then Oprah replies with "€100 million less than lucrative?" lol. If owning his own master recordings was so important why wasn't this inked as part of his deal back in 92?

According to one source Prince believed that he would get his masters back immediately if he would break his contract with WB, which was actually the case with almost every album released on Paisley Park Records (a separate deal) and only realized when he wanted to break-up with the label that they would keep the masters no matter what. According to that same source he was REALLY mad when his lawyers and WB told him that in the middle of the WB wars, so in 92 he couldn't care less. Seems plausible to me given how poorly his business was run all over the 80's and 90's.

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As for the source of the conflict, I invite you to read reply #5 in that thread, it will answer it: http://prince.org/msg/7/411426

databank said:

According to that same source he was REALLY mad when his lawyers and WB told him that in the middle of the WB wars, so in 92 he couldn't care less. Seems plausible to me given how poorly his business was run all over the 80's and 90's.

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I don't think we can claim that (bolded part) to be the case in such a general way. Prince had Alan Leeds around him for quite a while, who was an experienced professional. I personally speculate that Prince simply didn't care about his business and contractual situation for far too long. IIRC Alan Leeds told somewhere that Prince showed no real concern when he told him that the Lovesexy tour was a financial disaster. Prince obviously only cared about the music, and as long as the $$$ came in, he just couldn't be bothered to read contracts etc.

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When it came to the contract renewal with WB in 1992 then, I suppose that Prince indeed only saw that the contract could lift him up to a Madonna-like status not only within WB, but also in the whole business, and he simply couldn't be bothered to consider the details of the contract and to listen to the advice many people gave him not to sign it. I still think that signing this contract was Prince's biggest mistake in terms of managing his career.

SuperFurryAnimal said:

As far back as 1987 the relationship soured because of what WB said about his music and how he would write songs and they wanted the song to go to their artists. This was a question directed at Prince during one of the ONA soundchecks. He wanted to tell us more but he said that it would end up on the web and create problems. Not happy with what they did with songs far back as 87!!

i realize you just said you don't have the full answers but what does this mean? They wanted the song to go to their artists?

Even though Grafiti Bridge still sold, and Batman did great sales, those weren't classical Prince albums and both were attached to film projects. Lovesexy was a difficult record to sell, and the one before that was again, a project tied to a film.

People forget that D&P and the symbol record were seen as comeback records for Prince (who was falling out of style) and those records took an absurd amount of promotion. You get into funny accounting in those situations, and Prince really pimped himself out during Love Symbol. He had to pay for the gold microphones, and all those videos, and costumes, a huge touring group that rivaled MC Hammer, and one can see the economical problems there. He's also starts producing his own video content and in house graphics during that period. So my guess is, he's paying more up front costs, while the label is taking more backend money to cover their up front costs, and he realizes he's getting squeezed. He's up there rapping, literally shaking his bare ass, going back to the James Brown type songs, making glossy oveproduced songs, making dirty songs.... not much more he can do.

jaawwnn said:

SuperFurryAnimal said:

As far back as 1987 the relationship soured because of what WB said about his music and how he would write songs and they wanted the song to go to their artists. This was a question directed at Prince during one of the ONA soundchecks. He wanted to tell us more but he said that it would end up on the web and create problems. Not happy with what they did with songs far back as 87!!

i realize you just said you don't have the full answers but what does this mean? They wanted the song to go to their artists?

The way I understand it it means WB wanted Prince to give more songs to more WB artists instead of writing/producing songs for artists that were signed on other labels. In a way Prince was feeding the competition.

SuperFurryAnimal said:

As far back as 1987 the relationship soured because of what WB said about his music and how he would write songs and they wanted the song to go to their artists. This was a question directed at Prince during one of the ONA soundchecks. He wanted to tell us more but he said that it would end up on the web and create problems. Not happy with what they did with songs far back as 87!!

This probably relates to Crystal Ball, so it's nothing unknown.

Warners never really had that big a problem with his songs (hello, look at what they put out!) and more often than not gave him free reign to do as he pleased as far as I can see.

As far as them wanting songs to go to other artists on their roster, I've never heard that outside this soundcheck reference, but that seems a fair point too. Prince would put out an album by his latest bit of skirt but wouldn't give two shits where promotion was concerned and many of these records contained killer songs that could've had much bigger an impact had they been given the right platform. As it is they're now just "undiscovered gems" and "fan favourites" when maybe they could've been another Manic Monday. It's a record companies duty to get the most return from their investments - Prince pissing away his talent in exchange for pussy wasn't really doing much for them.

NouveauDance said:

SuperFurryAnimal said:

As far back as 1987 the relationship soured because of what WB said about his music and how he would write songs and they wanted the song to go to their artists. This was a question directed at Prince during one of the ONA soundchecks. He wanted to tell us more but he said that it would end up on the web and create problems. Not happy with what they did with songs far back as 87!!

This probably relates to Crystal Ball, so it's nothing unknown.

Warners never really had that big a problem with his songs (hello, look at what they put out!) and more often than not gave him free reign to do as he pleased as far as I can see.

As far as them wanting songs to go to other artists on their roster, I've never heard that outside this soundcheck reference, but that seems a fair point too. Prince would put out an album by his latest bit of skirt but wouldn't give two shits where promotion was concerned and many of these records contained killer songs that could've had much bigger an impact had they been given the right platform. As it is they're now just "undiscovered gems" and "fan favourites" when maybe they could've been another Manic Monday. It's a record companies duty to get the most return from their investments - Prince pissing away his talent in exchange for pussy wasn't really doing much for them.

Yes, I think it started with Crystal Ball. WB said no to what would have been Prince's crowning achievement.

jaawwnn said:

NouveauDance said:

SuperFurryAnimal said:

jaawwnn said:

i realize you just said you don't have the full answers but what does this mean? They wanted the song to go to their artists?

The question before that was about "Nothing Compares 2U" he seemed upset about Sineads version. Then that want into questions about WB and he said that we did not understand that problems started back in 87.

ok cool, thanks!

I think all of this has been deeply investigated here :

http://prince.org/msg/7/317254?pr

The very first time he had a problem with them came all the way back in 1981 when he wanted to release "Let's Rock", a song to capitalize on the dance craze "The Rock" that was popular in clubs at that time. Warners wouldn't release immediately and so Prince rewrote the song and it became "Let's Work", because the moment had passed.

Then, the Crystal Ball situation when WB refused to release three discs. By some accounts, after the album was paired down to 2 discs, Prince lost a great deal of interest. Crazy, given the power that SOTT has in his catalog and critical reputation as his best album.

So the contractual situation that appeared in the 90's was simply the latest in a list of times that Prince was upset with WB and that's the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.