When we look at how difficult it can be for musicians (and related artists), not only to climb up the ladder to stardom but simply to make a decent living from it, and how exuberant the profits from the music business and derivatives are, we might better understand Prince’s boycott of streaming media. streaming) they actually implicitly keep control of the music, managing and directing the technological heading, from which will derivate a toll, lets them happily collect as they will. By keeping control of monetization and the distribution modus operandi (e.g. Lack of understanding or interest in the technology, but also naivity and the natural propension of artists for playing solo makes them an easy pray for the new middlemen: the digital music services. Actually, since the mid nineties you already could do that. With the scalability offered by internet service providers, any artist could easily sell his work worldwide, and that would include streaming. Anyone with minimal expertise of commercial web services can set up a music distribution platform.
And today’s tools have shown so efficient that sending even uncompressed high resolution multichannel music files has become a child’s play, easy and cheap. The vast majority of today’s musicians wouldn’t even think music distribution without online availability. No one would refute the importance of online music distribution for bringing the artist’s studio to the listeners’ hifi. “ Essentially, streaming has offered labels the ability to pay themselves twice while reducing what is owed to is not about streaming, it is about control. And probably also due to his somewhat unruly manners and lack of entrepreneurial mojo. He tried many things to some success (from multimedia CDs to web exclusives, personal distribution platforms, communities, …), but maybe too early or too boldly, and probably with some lack of understanding of what online societal rules and/or fashion are. This is how you transform a creative enterprise into a successful and self-sustaining business. Regardless of the fate of it all, looking at Prince’s original primordial urge to go online, his philosophical / spiritual drive to play and share the music always has been for the sake of creative freedom, in order not only to deliver the real thing to those willing to hear (not only his fans) but also to get fair retribution for the work. Not for the sake of the platform itself, but for the music it would convey. Since the start of the modern internet (I’m thinking world wide web and after), as a musician-entrepreneur he rapidly understood that the technological nature of the internet could offer him both increased artistic and economical control by eliminating the distribution middleman, and as there were no platform readily available to his terms, he had to build his own.
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