http://www.nytimes.com/20...rince.html

Prince Opens Online Music Store
By CHRIS NELSON
Published: March 29, 2004

Prince's love-hate relationship with the mainstream music industry takes another turn today as he opens his online Musicology Download Store (www.npgmusicclub.com), turning his back on download services like Napster, Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes.

The move comes a week after Prince appeared to be cottoning to an industry he once compared to a form of slavery, announcing that he would team with Sony Music Entertainment's Columbia Records to release his new album, "Musicology."

Prince's lawyer and business partner, L. Londell McMillan, said the store was intended to increase membership in Prince's NPG Music Club. Ideally, customers "come there, buy songs, see the experience and go, 'Wow, I want to stay.' "

"We want to drive traffic to the club," he said. A lifetime membership to the club is $25 and offers exclusive songs, early access to concert tickets and other benefits. Sam Jennings, who helped start the club for Prince, declined to reveal the number of members, but a news release put it in the "hundreds of thousands.

Prince's download store will sell music for which he owns the master recordings. It opens with seven albums of studio and live material, some of which were previously available only to members of the NPG Music Club. Full albums will sell for $9.99 and individual songs for 99 cents; club members will 77 cents per song.

The Musicology Download Store will not sell Prince's best-known albums, like "Purple Rain," "1999" and "Sign 'O' the Times." Those albums are owned by Warner Brothers and available through iTunes, Rhapsody and other services.

Most artists receive a part of the 65 or 70 cents that their labels receive from a 99-cent download sale at online stores, said Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester Research. He said Prince could sell half as many songs through store and still make more money than through sales at a store like iTunes.

Bands like Phish, Pearl Jam and Metallica have also established download stores, although those Web sites primarily offer live music.

Since he left Warner Brothers Records in 1996, Prince has taken several unorthodox tacks for releasing music, most albums through his own labels and one, "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic," through Arista.

Tonight, fans will be able to watch a simulcast of his concert in Los Angeles at movie theaters across the country. The $15 admission fee at the theaters includes a copy of "Musicology."

Hurry up and open the store already!!!!!

i guess its all stuff weve already got with the exception of musicology. still who saw that coming not me

whoaa.

Sounds bitchin'.

Ahhhh, so the Chocolate Invasion is being released after all...kinda.

LIVE MATERIAL-now this sounds very interesting, very interesting indeed

radici27 said:

how much do u want to bet its the "c-note" soundchecks we already got, remember the chocolate invasion, that should take care of the 7 albums methinks

This is exciting. Even more so than the Musicology album in fact.

Could turn out not to be so. Have to wait and see.

...
[This message was edited Sun Mar 28 19:12:33 2004 by fauxnewbie]

album1 musicology
album2 ONA piano
album3 xpectation
album4 npgmusicclub yr1 trax disc1
album5 npgmusicclub yr1 trax disc2
album6 CNOTE soundchecks
album7 The War
[This message was edited Sun Mar 28 19:27:20 2004 by lust]

"Prince's download store will sell music for which he owns the master recordings. It opens with seven albums of studio and live material..."

So that would be:

Emancipation
Crystal Ball
Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic
The Rainbow Children
One Nite Alone - Live
N.E.W.S.
Musicology

I'm guessing the $9.99 per album would mean per disc for multi-disc sets like Emancipation, Crystal Ball and ONA.

Too bad the article doesn't mention what kind of restrictions there will be on the downloads. Like how many times we can burn a copy, can the tracks be played on portable players.
I guess we'll find out soon enough.

I hope there's gonna be some extended versions of Ronnie Talk To Russia in there...

HobbesLeCute said:

let me guess the "georgie talk to iran" 12 inch sherm stick edit

lust said:

The ony time I would be happy with Prince contemporizing that out of date masterpiece would be if it were for a Tony M Iggnant Mix.

Raven said:

This is wrong, since Prince owns the music, he would keep the full .65 cents through the iTunes store. Zero expense on his end for these sales. With his own store, he's excluding mac users, excluding iPod users, and has to pay overhead (hardware, bandwidth, staff, credit card processing fees) out of that 77 cents.

Cool.

There's way too much ambiguity in this article for me to get excited.

"seven albums of studio and live material...for which he owns the master recordings"

Hmmmm... are we going to play the "discs versus albums" game again.

Let's see... One night alone Live + It ain't over", that's 3 by itself. One Night Alone Piano, that's 4, N.E.W.S. that's 5, Xpectations - 6, and uh Musicology... 7! And/Or a mixture of Chocolate Invasion, take your pick.

I'm telling you right now, fair warning DO NOT, DO NOT get your hopes up about this, I know I'm not.

HobbesLeCute said:

"lifetime membership is $25"

wow, i'll never pay another membership fee!!! i guess that's why we are paying for the downloads now.

I was at the show in Reno and met a lot of new members, so I guess they will get a chance to access the music most of us who have been with the club since love4oneanother have already recieved. Prince is makeing money hand over fist, no wonder he said it would be such a good year for him, A good year in deeed!

I think it will be fine. The club is growing by leaps and bounds.
Well, It's gonna be a good step. And lifetime membership is only $25 dollars.
So I guess the current members have been given a free upgrade. Thanks, NPG.

We'll find out tomorrow . . .

I guess the Year One songs really weren't exclusive if you can buy them for 77 cents now . . .

I cant wait!!

I agree that it sounds promising, but it is smart not to get our hopes up too high. Maybe he will finally learn from Pearl Jam and start selling his amazing live gigs.

As far as the format, I wouldn't be that interested if the tracks weren't mp3 or something that could be converted to that.

Who's Chris Nelson?

From the NPGMC site:



So I guess they are probably going to be some licensed format that you can't easily burn to CD or listen to on a portable player, etc. If this is the case, I am much less interested in buying music, because I like to listen to it in different places. if he had something amazing for sale, maybe I'd still buy it, but I sure wouldn't buy the Musicology tracks in this format.

Of course we don't know all the details yet, so I'm still speculating. But I'd rather have some high bitrate mp3s. I guess those are too easy to share though, so I don't blame Prince for not wanting to sell those (kind of).

RupertZ said:

The uncompressed album is already being shared - before the store even opens. The restrictions they apparently are going with does nothing to stop that - instead it only stops many people from being able to buy the music.

FYI, it was confirmed months ago that the tracks will be in Windows Media Audio format, and they can be burned to a CD once or listened to on your computer.

That coupled with the fact that I've already paid for everything in there at least once, and I'm not in the slightest bit excited in this - although I'm not disappointed either, because I never thought they would put up anything of real interest. For whatever reason they have no desire at all right now to cater to the fans who have supported the club from the beginning....now that it's becoming more mainstream, it's "Fuck all y'all!"

THE STORE IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS !

chopdog said:

So, what's on offer?