The album formerly sold by...
by Duncan O'Leary
I was bemused watching the news yesterday. Apparently Prince has ‘insulted’ record stores by giving his album away for free with the Mail on Sunday. Now unless this is a comment on the choice of newspaper i don’t get it: did music stores collectively do him a favour in his early career, or did they just sell his records because they were worth selling? And isn’t his own album his to give away? I’m guessing Prince fans aren’t feeling all that insulted right now as they sit at home listening to the album. Or am i missing something..?
Will Davies
Agreed. But the old gits amongst us might just add that the decline of record stores (for whatever reason) and the rise of freely available, freely disposable music is, at the very least, something of a shame. What the web 2.0 and long tail zealots miss every time is that the way you find or access something (be it a friend, a song, a policy) is constitutive of its value to some extent. Ultra convenience is a hard thing to love. I don't think Prince is necessarily doing consumers any favours in the long run (and certainly not other musicians) by allowing an album to become something that accidentally ends up in the recycling bin with all the other crap they put inside newspapers these days.
Sam Jones
Plus, there's the value of record shops as a social space and the knock-on benefits for innovation. Perhaps that's a slightly different point, but still worth making.
Pete Bradwell
Absolutely; record stores are important for lots of reasons - even when they're the type that make you buy things you don't like to avoid the embarrassment of wanting to own a band's later albums. I still think it's pretty cool and less than a disaster that Prince gave his album away, but the point about the disposability of music is a really interesting one.Like Vince Noir in the Mighty Boosh said, it's all about context. It's certainly difficult to grow attached to the auto-recommendations mechanics from the hive mind of amazon's customer base; or a list of .mp3 icons. But I think its interesting that a lot of the means to access music now add significant value; an hour of myspace link-following or 'visiting' lots of little online, friendly record labels can be a delightful way to find new music. In this sense, online and real life shopping maybe aren't really that different. I don't really find my experience of Amazon that different to HMV etc (aside from meeting, very briefly and in the most trivial sense, real people) - they're easy to use, full of stuff I half-want; in short, like Will just said, I find both very difficult to love.
Pete Bradwell
Will has a good column on this stuff up at the Register, here.
Pete Bradwell
I don't think you're missing anything, this seems spot on. I'm rather enjoying the reasonably hilarious public meltdown of businesses that have, frankly, for too long had a pretty easy ride on the back of the public's healthy appetite for pop culture (I don't think we should include Fopp in that necessarily; it's closure had different causes). Prince 'insulted' record stores just like longer copyright and over-bearing rights management (technological and otherwise) 'protect' artists.