In addition to Prince doing two sold out shows in Toronto, he has an interview in today's Globe and Mail.
I thought this was the most interesting part, on his current tour, a CD of his new album is included in the ticket price, and counts in the Soundscan tally. Effectively, Prince is using a controlled circulation business model to increase his chart numbers, and increase album sales, which feed back to ticket sales. Now why can't the rest of the apparently four distributors learn from him?
Concerts are selling out and copies of his latest CD, Musicology, are moving briskly. The two successes are not unrelated. Sitting on the receiving dock of the ACC as he spoke were 45,000 copies of Musicology, stripped-down versions of the CD that contained all the songs of the Columbia-distributed discs found in record stores, but with no liner notes. Each concertgoer to a Prince show is handed a disc upon admittance.The price of the CD is added onto the concert ticket — with each ticket sold, an album is recorded as sold as well, thus boosting Musicology to platinum status in the United States, with sales of more than one-million copies.
His dressing room is candle-lit, with a plush couch and chair. Music plays softly in the background, and an acoustic guitar sits next to a formidable collection of cosmetics, arrayed in front of a mirror.
"The record companies are only a delivery service," Prince explains, when asked about his new relationship with Sony-owned Columbia. "Anything more than that, when they want to produce or tell us what singles to release, we're just puppets. As for record-company ownership of the music, "that's like Federal Express keeping what they deliver, and giving you a copy."
Article comments
1 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
what about if you already have a copy of the album though? do you get a normal priced ticket, then? Is there such a thing for a normal priced prince ticket?
2 - Jim Carruthers
Duke, you make it sound like one could have too many Prince CDs.
As far as I know, you buy a ticket, you get a CD. Don't want it? Give it to somebody else.
3 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
jim, good point. One can never have too many, i would guess. And as you say, you could always give it to someone. Still, it'd be nice if maybe he gave out a CD of otherwise-unavailable stuff in the future. Mind you, that'd suck if you couldn't cough up the 6 million quid ticket price.
4 - Jim Carruthers
Well, he's been selling all sorts of stuff on his web site over the last couple of years. Of course, if you are here in Toronto, you can always just take the TTC up to the Bridle Path part of town, hike over and ring his bell (so to speak, or as the actress said to the bishop).
At which point he will probably release the purple dyed pit bulls to chew yr nutz oph 4vr.