djThunderfunk said:

databank said:

Interesting, thanks.

Do you or anyone else remember what the speculation was in the community? I remember that I expected a chronologically organized collection covering P's whole career, very much like an official version of the Jewel Box bootlegs collections. I was very surprised to see it wasn't that at all.

I don't remember speculation and had no idea what to expect myself, as far as tracklist anyway.
I expected to get an exclusive release, not available in stores. I did not expect to see it for sale at Best Buy while awaiting my order.

.

And to add insult to injury: pre-orders didn't even get a physical booklet.

BartVanHemelen said:

djThunderfunk said:

Content was not advertised to those who pre-ordered. Nobody knew what to expect until it came out (at Best Buy, weeks before most of us got our pre-orders).

[Edited 3/17/18 6:11am]

.

The tracklist was leaked shortly before release, and people had trouble believing it because it was so shitty. That was after months of numerous fake tracklists.

I ordered it the week they started taking pre-orders (about a year before the release). At that point, it was 3 discs, no tracklist. So, my order was not contingent on any leaked tracklist or the numerous fake tracklists. When I ordered, I had no expectations in regards to content.

The three-disc part of the set that was Crystal Ball was 30 songs - seven of them were either previously released ("Good Love" and "Interactive") or were remixes of past releases. So the "bootleg" portion of the release was 23 songs spread over 3 discs. That did not compare favorably to the then-still-relatively-recent Emancipation, which had 36 new tracks on the same number of discs.

The most desirable of the remaining content also frustrated - an official release of "Crystal Ball" with no "purple underground" speech means you've just got another version of the song - not one to replace the bootleg.

The phone order operation Prince's team set up was nuts - people were paying a premium for a version of the collection that had Kamasutra but no booklet, and maybe a t-shirt got thrown in, but the set was 25 bucks cheaper at Media Play/Best Buy/Blockbuster Music, and people could get it at those locations weeks earlier.

Crystal Ball found a lot of fans doing what is always looked upon as the gold standard of dedication - direct financial support of an artist's work - and getting the short end of the stick in return, as they were treated worse than the accidental consumer at retail.
[Edited 3/20/18 18:53pm]

I know for some fans bootlegs were the only thing that kept us connected to Prince during some of his eras. In the mid to late 90’s I was not very interesed in his current material, although I bought everything he released. However I was blown away with all the bootleg material. I remember receiving a box with over 20 VHS tapes of Prince materials from a fellow trader. I stayed up a many late nights consuming all the freshly received stuff. Tons of CD burning, buying originals, trading with people from all over the planet, anxiously waiting for the next mail delivery. What fun!

Being a Prince fan for all these years has been a great experience. I’ve enjoyed trading and sharing with many other fans. Helping newbies out and being helped by more advanced traders. Amassing a collection so large there is no way I could re-listen to it all if I wanted to.

I’m sure this will be debated until all of us that were fans while Prince was alive die or lose interest. My take on it is that the bootleg culture was a net positive for Prince. He fed it himself by playing unreleased music live all the time. He knew we had the materials because he saw us first hand talking about it on this site and others. He fought against as would be expected but for most of us we saw no real consequences for acquiring the material anyway we could. It never stopped us from buying everything he released, spending tons of money on concerts, websites and fan clubs. His biggest supporters have always been the bootleg collectors.

20 years people..let it go...

mynameisnotsusan said:

20 years people..let it go...

Yes, Yes, YES!! I totally agree!

People like to be negative and rewrite history.

Crystall Ball was the first and greatest ecommerce experiment even before ecommerce was accepted as a term. It was a very exciting time!

Prince had created an online campaign to drive sales as an independent artist with no middleman taking a cut. No one was doing this. Prince was the first. No one was using online payments. Security was poor and trust didn't exist, yet it is pioneering campaigns like this that made the internet.

The premise was simple. Pre-order a 3 CD set. Once pre-orders hit 100,000 they would start manufacturing. Obviously pre-orders exceeded that threashold. The postman then delivered. But to everyone's surprise the 3 CD set turned into a 5 CD set, a tshirt and an online lyric website. It was also a stunning and unique package.

I had mine deliverd to work - BMG at the time! I must have shown everyone! We then had the New Power Soul and Rave projects so life was just getting better and better for a Prince fan!

Sadly some people just don't buy into the excitement of such a campaign and are the sort of people who just have out their begging bowl wanting more, more more.

However, I thoughly enjoyed this campaign and the retail version that followed!

Happy days!!!

Bootleg Culture, Bootlegs are the backstories of Purple Music. Like reading the Purple Rain script.

Interesting read.

It's hard to even imagine a "fan" who's against bootleg itself - especially in this day and age.

I've only been a fan for slightly more than a decade now and for sure the unreleased/unofficial materials of Prince helped me understand his work process better and made me a bigger fan. Some of those reveal his flaws, imperfections and limits but some, in fact most of those just simply blow me away. It's an addicting ride, collecting unofficial stuff of P's.

Bootleg distribution culture however is a different topic. It seems quite a number of "fans" I've come acorss feel as if they are entitled to some type of compensation (mostly financial) for sharing the materials...

happinessinitsuncutform said:

Interesting read.

It's hard to even imagine a "fan" who's against bootleg itself - especially in this day and age.

I've only been a fan for slightly more than a decade now and for sure the unreleased/unofficial materials of Prince helped me understand his work process better and made me a bigger fan. Some of those reveal his flaws, imperfections and limits but some, in fact most of those just simply blow me away. It's an addicting ride, collecting unofficial stuff of P's.

Bootleg distribution culture however is a different topic. It seems quite a number of "fans" I've come acorss feel as if they are entitled to some type of compensation (mostly financial) for sharing the materials...

we have a few here, they act like it is a sin or something

darkroman said:

How did anyone "rewrite history"?

Pointing out that the release of Crystal Ball did not go smoothly is not complaining nor in any way revisionist - it is what happened. Prince's camp promised a package of vault tracks. When the time came to deliver that package, his organization was unable to handle fulfillment in anything like a timely fashion, and as a result, the people who directly supported him received their packages well after they already were available in stores. Beyond that, the people who were made to wait also paid a premium for that privilege. It was substantially less expensive to go to the local music seller and get the set than it was to purchase it directly, and of course there was no waiting for that.

Kamasutra was the intended bonus for those direct orders - and later, the t-shirt was thrown in. I believe the t-shirt was leftovers from a then-recent tour. If I recall correctly (alt.music.Prince was full of people howling over how the process went down at the time), t-shirts only started showing up in orders after people started complaining about the wait. Regardless, paying what was basically double for the addition of a t-shirt and Kamasutra included in a very late delivery was not model customer service.

Suggesting that people should "buy into the excitement of the campaign" is utterly ludicrous. Prince set up a business proposition, and his core constituency - his real fans - supported him in that endeavor. His business was not prepared to handle that business properly, and it went poorly. Recognizing that fact doesn't make a person an ingrate.

If you ordered a lamp direct from the lamp factory and received the same treatment Prince's buyers received in the process of obtaining Crystal Ball, you would consider it inappropriate. The fact that it was music discs from Our Hero doesn't change the fact that its transactional nature was identical. People who paid more buying it direct shouldn't receive a lesser outcome than people who walked into Best Buy and paid less.

As for wanting, "more, more, more," maybe people just wanted the promised three discs to be...filled with three discs' worth of material. Also, there's opportunity cost involved in putting on the collection any specific song. Why would Prince include songs that had been officially released on a set meant to be a "bootleg"? Why so many remixes? These are legitimate questions.

Prince did not do right by his most supportive fans with that release - that's the unfortunate truth.

snakesineverycolor said:

You have a legitimate point with the remixes. However, what songs had been officially released? Arguably even the remixes were unreleased, other than 'How U Wanna Be Done' which was part of a longer medley on 'The Purple Medley' single. 'Good Love' had once been available on the OST, but wasn't easy to find to my knowledge.

OperatingThetan said:

"Good Love" was on the Bright Lights, Big City soundtrack, and Interactive was on the CD-ROM game of the same name. At the time, both were easy to find if someone went looking for them. And the likeliest people to do that search...were exactly the same core audience as the one to which a "bootleg" collection was marketed.

And, as mentioned above, there were the five remixes. 7 songs out of 30 that clearly were less desirable than a huge assortment of never-released tracks that were available.

snakesineverycolor said:

OperatingThetan said:

You have a legitimate point with the remixes. However, what songs had been officially released? Arguably even the remixes were unreleased, other than 'How U Wanna Be Done' which was part of a longer medley on 'The Purple Medley' single. 'Good Love' had once been available on the OST, but wasn't easy to find to my knowledge.

"Good Love" was on the Bright Lights, Big City soundtrack, and Interactive was on the CD-ROM game of the same name. At the time, both were easy to find if someone went looking for them. And the likeliest people to do that search...were exactly the same core audience as the one to which a "bootleg" collection was marketed. And, as mentioned above, there were the five remixes. 7 songs out of 30 that clearly were less desirable than a huge assortment of never-released tracks that were available.

Good Love was really a puzzling choice for, indeed, the OST where everywhere to be found second hand. The Interactive CD-R was much rarer and it was a shorter edit on it.

.

I won't argue with the fiasco that it was from a commercial perspective. I personally didn't care because I hadn't pre-ordered it, I got it in the store on the day of release and I got the Kamasutra version later at a show, because it was for sale on the 98 tour (that meant re-buying the whole set but hell, I didn't really care because finding it there was such a good surprise that I was just too happy to put my hands on an actual Kamasutra CD!). But yeah, it wasn't cool for those who pre-ordered it, granted. I was pissed a decade later when Prince took my 77 bucks and ran, leaving me with this near-empty Lotuscam.com website for a year

.

I also won't argue with the fact that with a tracklist like that (lots of alternates of released songs, lots of 90's songs, editing Crucial...), Prince should have known that many a fan would be disappointed.

And the funniest thing is that all the tracks could actually have fit on TWO CD's (50x3 = 150 = 2 75mn long discs)

On the other hand, I don't think artists should work with what their fans would like in mind. If that record was Prince's vision, then so be it.

.

Now when it comes to the actual content, I think if it had been an actual bootleg with that exact sound quality, fans at the time would have LOVED it, as such. There were many problems with this release, but at the end of the day it was a super solid record. Of course if you didn't like the music on it, then the joke was on you. But this fan loved it, and still does after 20 years, from beginning to end. It's such an awesome party album, it's so incredibly well sequenced and it covers so many facets of P's creativity... I was disappointed with the tracklist when I read it on the booklet, and I was disappointed to realize that 25 more minutes of music could have been added to each CD, but after listening to it a few times I couldn't possibly have wanted it to have been anything else. I wouldn't even have wanted the CD's to be filled because it would have ruined the oh-so-perfect pace of the whole.

[Edited 3/23/18 7:28am]