(Credit: Alamy)
Prince was famous for always having his eyes on tomorrow, considering he was the author of “1999,” a song about the apocalypse that was written in 1982 and still sounds futuristic in 2024. So when the Internet came along and changed the way people created, recorded, and distributed music, the icon certainly had something to say about it.
For the most part, Prince was against the idea of streaming sites. He took their technology very seriously and felt that publishing it on streaming sites with the money they offered would undermine his own work. To be fair to him, there’s still debate about how much streaming sites pay artists, with artists like Weird Al criticizing Spotify’s fees in a recent Wrapped video.
His complicated relationships continued throughout his career, resulting in him often refusing to publish his music to streaming sites and becoming frustrated whenever people tried to put videos of his live performances online. Did. His infamous falling out with Radiohead was for that very reason. When he covered “Creep” and blocked all uploaded videos of that performance, Thom Yorke and his friends thought Prince was trying to outclass them.
“Really? Did he block it? York said. “Sure, we should block it. Wait a minute…well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our… song.”
His dissatisfaction with the online world led him to declare that the age of the Internet was “over.” In a 2010 interview he said: “The internet is completely dead. I don’t see why we should give our new music to iTunes or anyone else. I’m a big believer in finding new ways to distribute my music.”
The singer went on to say, “The Internet is like MTV. MTV used to be trendy and all of a sudden it’s obsolete. All these computers and digital devices are useless anyway. I don’t know what’s in my head. Nothing good comes from just being full of numbers.”
Prince got a lot of things right throughout his career, but unfortunately, his prediction about the end of the internet never quite came true. Although the debate over how ethical streaming sites work is still debated, far too many people are now listening to music over the internet. If an artist wants to get their sound out there, they need to make it accessible on streaming sites.
Essentially, Prince was still ahead of his time when it came to his views. Those views are widely shared and repeated throughout today’s music industry, but the power of those views meant his predictions were slightly off the mark. Perhaps his thinking was that if enough musicians decided to deliver differently, things might change. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened yet and probably never will.
