Prince Says The “Internet Is Over” And No Longer “Hip”.

[jsills]

prince is a funny fucking dude. homey wore "slave" on his face because he couldnt get out of his record contract. Now hes crying about not getting advances? intresting philosphy

[JBE]

Verizon and Comcast is defo in the area and I have had both and they are both crooks but have let me do my thing for the most part...I think they backed off when the customers became outraged.

I really doubt consumers had anything to do with it. They have a monopoly where I am. You either use comcast or you don't get cable internet. They can throttle, block, or cap me as much as they want, and my only recourse is not to be on the net anymore.

Actually I think you are right, I think they were made to quit doing that. I can't remember what the story is. The whole communications industry is fucked up like that. Same with my phone where I pay for "unlimited" internet but everyone knows there is a "soft cap" in place. It is false advertisement if you ask me. I do have a choice I switched to Verizon who is just as bad, no they are actually worse because it's the same problems but it's DSL instead and my speeds are retarded. I did tests on my iphone switching back and forth from wifi to 3g and 3g beat it every time. Oh christ this could be a long thread we had to go there lol

Oh and just to be fair I was downloading a movie while doing the test but that is insane that one little torrent can choke the living shit out of my internet.

If you were using a torrent program and you don't have the program optimized properly, the program itself can in fact destroy your connection. When I started using Utorrent, whenever I downloaded anything with it my entire connection was garbage while it was running. Whenever you download a torrent, you are not only downloading but you are also seeding at the same time. If you were just downloading then it wouldn't hurt your connection too much, but uploading is a whole new story.

[wormcode]

I think he is just chatting shit. He seems to talk about or try to do the polar opposite of what is popular or the norm, so him saying such things doesn't surprise me. I don't think he actually believes it or knows enough about it to reach a logical conclusion. Him being involved in getting obvious fair use videos (like the kid dancing to his music) removed is a pretty dick move as well. That's certainly no way to encourage people to buy your music in any format.

Comparing internet to MTV doesn't really work either. A single television network is pretty limited, whereas a global network of billions of people isn't. Each one of those people is capable of starting their own type of "MTV" online if they want. There's infinite room for innovation, and we will continue to see it evolve and grow into more things. Some aspects of it will die off of course, but others will rise up in their place. After MTV fucked off into reality television hell, MUCH better music channels emerged and became much more accessible as things like satellite services got cheaper and more popular.

[deadly_habit]

Verizon and Comcast is defo in the area and I have had both and they are both crooks but have let me do my thing for the most part...I think they backed off when the customers became outraged.

I really doubt consumers had anything to do with it. They have a monopoly where I am. You either use comcast or you don't get cable internet. They can throttle, block, or cap me as much as they want, and my only recourse is not to be on the net anymore.

Actually I think you are right, I think they were made to quit doing that. I can't remember what the story is. The whole communications industry is fucked up like that. Same with my phone where I pay for "unlimited" internet but everyone knows there is a "soft cap" in place. It is false advertisement if you ask me. I do have a choice I switched to Verizon who is just as bad, no they are actually worse because it's the same problems but it's DSL instead and my speeds are retarded. I did tests on my iphone switching back and forth from wifi to 3g and 3g beat it every time. Oh christ this could be a long thread we had to go there lol

Oh and just to be fair I was downloading a movie while doing the test but that is insane that one little torrent can choke the living shit out of my internet.

If you were using a torrent program and you don't have the program optimized properly, the program itself can in fact destroy your connection. When I started using Utorrent, whenever I downloaded anything with it my entire connection was garbage while it was running. Whenever you download a torrent, you are not only downloading but you are also seeding at the same time. If you were just downloading then it wouldn't hurt your connection too much, but uploading is a whole new story.

http://img576.imageshack.us/img576/858/ ... 782458.png
also

[nowaysj]

[paradigm_x]

OTOH... read this via doa, interesting stuff. Poss poss tldr.

Why Prince Is Right.

By now you’ll have had a good laugh at Prince, chortled righteously in disbelief at the latest mad-hatter outburst from his Purple Highness. In a statement that raised some interesting points, the most commonly snorted at was the Minneapolis Midget’s assertion that the ‘internet is dead’. This, to the social web-savvy twittering classes was the equivalent of the ‘you don’t sweat a lot for a fat lass’ chat-up line. The type of gambit that, even before the victim has stopped sneering indignantly, has done it’s job. It grabs the attention. Hard to ignore something and hope it dies of neglect when you’ve just re-tweeted it to all your followers. Savvy play by Prince, and, my word, this is a savvy man. In the social media world of blogs, forums, comment boxes and twitter, the cheapest way to garner an aura of authority is to affect a world-weary cynicism. There are scores of web-users, whose ‘critically astute’ online reputations have been gained by eternally criticising the efforts of creative experimenters with the ‘oh, he’s so yesterday’ line. On this occasion, Prince got there just a touch before them, and their overexaggerated stage-shock reactions of ‘oh, we’ll all have to stop tweeting now, Prince says the internet is dead. Har har, what a loser’ are a secure a way of marking them out as the type of person whose defence mechanism is to sneer rather than to think. If these were the primordial plains of human evolution, they are the apes who would still be sneering at the other tribe’s gimmicky use of ‘tools’, right up to the point where the arrow went through their head.

So shall we laugh at Prince? Or shall we stop for a moment and ask ourselves whether this is a man worthy of having his points listened to? This is the man who gave us Sign o’ the Times; the multi-tasker who played every instrument on the Batman soundtrack; the man who knows enough about how the popular mind works to have penned Purple Rain, 1999, Nothing Compares 2 U, Alphabet Street. An artist who, when not composing the crowd-pleasing pop of the Bangles’ Manic Monday, can come up with works of musical erudition such as When Doves Cry. I am not in the slightest bit interested in whether you LIKE any of his work, or whether you think his creative peak has passed. What I would like you to do is ask yourself the question: ‘is someone of this calibre really someone whose opinions I should dismiss with a sneer?’ Because if you think that your opinion on the validity of the internet as a distribution and marketing tool for musicians is worth more than Prince’s, so much so that you’re not willing to even think about it, you shouldn’t really be reading this.

Because, after making the one statement that he knew would get him some viral attention, Prince went on to make some pretty good points. But perhaps you’re still not interested in those. Perhaps you’re still laughing at the idea that the internet is dead. Well, for some purposes it is. What do you do to differentiate yourself from the musical dross in 2010? Let’s say you are a disciplined and proven musical virtuoso, with the resources to make a professional-sounding record. Not only that, but you also have the cash, and respect, for a producer to come in and give your music a searingly critical once-over. To point out the flaws, the weaknesses and – far more importantly – tell you how to fix them? You’ve honed your act over the decades, put in the time. Well then, you have your record. Would you fling it out onto the web – to iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, Spotify, LastFm and Facebook? To flounder there under the same lousy, useless, chickenfeed conditions as the offerings of everything from some spotty d’n'b dj with a couple of tracks he ‘laid down on BandCamp, man’ to the most recent ditsy stageschool ‘chick with a stick’ acoustic singer-songwriter? Put it into an arena where every listener who gets that nagging earworm feeling when they hear something they love… can just go and hear it, at will, for free, until that nagging need is assuaged and replaced by whatever next draws at their capital in the information economy? If you’re about to say ‘well, BlancoMusic have music online, why do YOU do it if it’s so awful?’, the answer is that we’re forced to. We don’t have the resources or the profile to do anything than to bend over and let the internet shaft us where it stings. And it does sting. Believe me, when you know that every word you write, every note that Robin lays down in the studio, every re-tweet from a major newspaper critic is gathering you ‘valuable’ PR, it seems wonderful at first. But the truth is, internet PR is about as useful to making a living as a ‘Boycott Israel’ twibbon is to a West Bank school under mortar fire. For every hundred people who are moved by an online mention to check out BlancoMusic, ninety-nine will check out a song or two, or read the blog, or add it to their LastFm playlist or think, ‘cool, I must see if I can find that on Pirate Bay’. And on THIS, readers, I know of what I speak. Website visits to sales ratio? Somewhere in the region of 8,000 to 1. Oh, I hear the sneers now ‘but that’s just because your music’s shit, mate’. Grow up. It’s not shit.

What Prince has figured out is that the proportion of effort/return on pushing the internet user to actually BUY music, is not worth the resources it takes to do so. When 80 – 90% of your PR effort disappears into non-revenue online areas (piracy, Spotify), the PR needs to be 8-9 times as ubiquitous as in the pre-internet era to make the same gains. He’s done the sums, and has figured out that even if he only stands to make a penny profit on each CD that goes out on the cover of various European newspapers, that it’s worth more to him than a hundred million people retweeting a YouTube clip of his track on YouTube. Newspapers are an established physical distribution platform, to make them the sole legal source of your music is a mark of genius thinking. Why SHOULD Prince make his music available to be listened to at will, for nothing (or as close as dammit) on YouTube, Spotify or Mog.com? For YOUR convenience? So that you can enjoy his work and display your musical credibility to your dinnerparty guests without the painful business of compensating the artist in question? Oh how RUDE of dear little Prince to deny you the opportunity. He’s an artist. Artists reserve the right, in fact, would not be worthy of the name if they didn’t do so, to piss from a height on the money-grubbing mores of the chattering classes. Don’t give me the ‘democratisation of music’ argument. If it were something we could do ourselves, what would be the value in that?! If you want free music, go and get free music from the many, many fame-scrabbling halfwits with guitars and laptops out there who are willing to give it away. That’s how much free music is WORTH.

Bitter? Moi? Yes. Exceedingly so actually. Because long before (and who can say, possibly long after) BlancoMusic existed, I was a music lover. And even if there comes a point where music no longer provides me with an income, I will still hate this period in music’s lifespan – when even the types of people who buy eggs from farmers’ markets and FairTrade coffee are somehow too eager to blame the decline of music on the malpractice of the music industry and spout fatuous self-serving nonsense about how filesharing is ‘free pr for the artists’. I can make a living without music, that’s not an issue. The issue is that the internet is making music shit. There, I’ve said it. It’s putting the actual making of music secondary to the complicated business of trying to find a way of sustaining a living from doing so. Genius, forced to figure out ways to tour without having to incur excess baggage costs. Virtuosos, giving up music because they refuse to take the whore’s option of product placement or naked dancers in their videos. Music lovers have CD collections, not hard-drives full of shit they never listen to. This all happened before, we call it the dark ages. Yep, the internet is over, it’s killed my first love.

Don’t tell me you can’t afford to buy CDs. My entire collection is worth less than your phone and laptop.

The reason why you’re pissed off about what Prince said is because you know what it really means is that Prince does not give a shit about you. He doesn’t want you to have his record. Not unless you’re willing to get off your arse and pay for it. Nothing Compares 2 U. You remember the track? Baldy Irish girl took it to number one for about a hundred weeks? Prince wrote that, it was on the Black album. The Black Album was never released because Prince wasn’t happy with it. It became an underground hit, just having heard the recordings was a mark of credibility throughout the era. Word-of-mouth buzz, in an age before textmessages or social networks; when teenagers went Inter-Railing for a whole month WITHOUT MOBILE PHONES OR E-MAIL!!!, and civil protest was a rite of passage involving tear-gas and baton-charges (as opposed to Facebook groups and twibbons). Back when ‘the kids’ weren’t actually better behaved than their parents. There’s the insult, because what Prince is really saying, and what’s really pissing everyone off, is that being ‘on it’, musically, in an era where everyone’s desperately pleading for your attention, ain’t exactly the same as when you had to work a bit for your record collection. He knows damned well that there are DubStep clubs in Bow that were hip two years ago, where nothing of the setlist got heard on anything but vinyl and that by the time the webmob got to hear of it, were over. His biggest-selling hit came off a record that only ever got released on bootleg! What does this man want with a social network buzz! Get real, that’s for desperate little girls with stage-school mockney accents and rich dads.

And why shouldn’t he ask for an advance from iTunes? Right now, the iTunes service is this:

YOU put in the energy and time and money to make a record.
WE will host that on our clunky-as-shite server/shop.
YOU will have only three pricing options per track.
WE will take 30% of the retail price.
YOU will pay all recording, promo, pr, touring and living costs.
WE will take no significant financial risk in digitally distributing your product, but will still ask for a comparable commission to the bricks-and-mortar shops, manufacturers and distributors who actually always lost money if your physical record bombed.
YOU might, by your reputation and PR efforts, bring a great deal of filthy lucre to our operation, however YOU can FUCK OFF if you think we’re ever likely to risk advancing you some MONEY, recoupable against sales, on the likelihood that you DO.
WE, after the traditional major label business-model has been well and truly fucked by piracy and the iPhone: ‘whaddaya mean I have to PAY for music!’ generation, reserve the right (seeing as we already control the majority of digital music content AND the devices used to listen to it) to team up with another entity (let’s say Sony or Google Music, for example) to completely dominate the music content and delivery market.
YOU, being to all intents and purposes, bereft of any other way to significantly distribute your music, will be obliged to conform to our directives regarding royalties, content, style etc.
WE, at that point, might actually get involved in the filesharing issue, which WE have the resources, connections and legal gravity to hammer into atoms with high-profile lawsuits and political lobbying, were WE to have a financial interest in doing so.

UNLESS you happen to be Prince, or anyone else who actually has the BALLS to stand up to a music distribution and sales model that does nothing whatsoever for the continuation and propogation of great music other than to say something along the lines of ‘yeah baby, you can make all the movies you like, but I own all the movie halls and I ain’t gonna show ‘em unless you bend over, darlin”

Look, I’m aware that I’ve ranted a bit in this post. I’m also aware that I’m not going to change anything. I just want you to know that, no matter how evil or corrupt you think the major labels have acted over the past five decades, they always offered the musician something of value up front. Most of the whining about major labels comes from acts who would never have been signed, even in the 80s/90s heyday of music. Majors exploited bands, sure. Bands exploited them back. There were ways and means, and a lot of people got to make a living out of making music, and a lot of us got to hear music that made out lives fuller and better because of that system. Prince hates the majors too. They really screwed him over. No system is perfect, but the argument that digital distribution benefits the artist, and that it therefore has moral superiority over the major label system rests on a misconception. It assumes that the transition of recorded music from being a privilege based on merit to a democratically available option will somehow advance the artistic value of our society. If anything it does the opposite. It does for music what replacing pub bands with karaoke machines did.

The responsibility of the future of quality music does not lie with the artists or the industry. It lies with you. The patron. The BUYER.

http://blancomusic.wordpress.com/2010/0 ... -is-right/

[symmetricalsounds]

i can't even begin to go into all the reasons why that blog post annoys me.

[wirez]

Wirez are you seriously saying you want the man watching the internets 247 too??? Fuck that I'd rather never make another penny on music than have big bro everywhere I go.

In a perfect world, I don't think the internet would exist.

And to be fair, I'm not saying I religiously want to be watched 24/7 fair play, I'm just saying... We probably are to an extent anyway. If everybody sticks to the law, they shouldn't really be bothered about being watched should nothing be restricted when you're not breaking the law

And you could argue about different places having different laws; well... Make an internet law! Gives new job opportunities to the many in need at the moment 'internet police - get paid by your government to sit on your arse' yaaaay!

[wirez]

"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."

What an awesome quote!

[wirez]

Yes he is serious. These kids are raised in environments with ever more government control, and they think it is normal & acceptable. Their children's children will have monitors implanted in their brains and they will think it is totally normal.

Sorry Noways, I forget how old you are

Completely the opposite, the more controlled an area becomes the more people will rebel and the rebellion will continue to pass down generations until the leaders are overthrown. Personally, I just think people should be more respectful of others regardless of law. Order and monitoring is needed unfortunately. I'm glad I'm yet to be beaten or stabbed to death, with youngers around now that have no self discipline and no conscious, law and order is about the only thing protecting this country from anarchy.

You got me twisted mate, UK's government control is pretty minor compared to some other democratic countries. I just have a personal opinion that if people can't discipline themselves enough to be courteous and respectful then a strong law and order has to be in place.

[wirez]

Thanks Paradigm, I needed that

[JBE]

And why shouldn’t he ask for an advance from iTunes? Right now, the iTunes service is this:

YOU put in the energy and time and money to make a record.
WE will host that on our clunky-as-shite server/shop.
YOU will have only three pricing options per track.
WE will take 30% of the retail price.
YOU will pay all recording, promo, pr, touring and living costs.
WE will take no significant financial risk in digitally distributing your product, but will still ask for a comparable commission to the bricks-and-mortar shops, manufacturers and distributors who actually always lost money if your physical record bombed.
YOU might, by your reputation and PR efforts, bring a great deal of filthy lucre to our operation, however YOU can FUCK OFF if you think we’re ever likely to risk advancing you some MONEY, recoupable against sales, on the likelihood that you DO.
WE, after the traditional major label business-model has been well and truly fucked by piracy and the iPhone: ‘whaddaya mean I have to PAY for music!’ generation, reserve the right (seeing as we already control the majority of digital music content AND the devices used to listen to it) to team up with another entity (let’s say Sony or Google Music, for example) to completely dominate the music content and delivery market.
YOU, being to all intents and purposes, bereft of any other way to significantly distribute your music, will be obliged to conform to our directives regarding royalties, content, style etc.
WE, at that point, might actually get involved in the filesharing issue, which WE have the resources, connections and legal gravity to hammer into atoms with high-profile lawsuits and political lobbying, were WE to have a financial interest in doing so.

I gotta say, a lot of that post was just "blah Blah" to me, but I found this pretty interesting. Honestly this is pretty much the reason why there are 5837202 digital labels out there. It takes almost nothing to essentially call yourself a "digital label". I mean what really goes into it? Create a website. Go on some random music forums and tell everyone you're a new up and coming net label. You then go to other production sites like DSF and then make a thread saying you're now accepting demos which are then sent to you via soundcloud or email or some other way, which essentially ends up being free as well. So now you got a website which a lot of times costs almost nothing now a days to have created. You've essentially advertised yourself on some sites, completely free of charge aside from what you pay for your internet. You then have a bunch of people that you are essentially hoping on being extremely desperate and willing to send you their entire catalogue of music completely free and in some cases don't even think twice about what you are doing with these tracks once they are sent.

Then you got places like ITunes, Beatport and other digital retailers where you give them your track, you put all the work into it, and then they take a good chunk of your sales and for what? Hosting it on a website and collecting the fees? You can do that yourself with Paypal and anyone with a credit card can buy through paypal now without an account, which is what you need to even buy the tracks off these sites already. On top of that these sites don't even do any real advertising for you. You have to go out there and whore yourself to every site you can find just so people know your shit is there to be bought. If you're lucky someone might actually stumble across your song over the other 50 million songs that are on the site already.

I think as far as digital labels go there still needs to be some serious work done. At this point it just seems more beneficial to the artist to just do all this themselves and hope that you create a enough hype for yourself that you catch the ear of some real credible labels. I'm not talking about something like Interscope or another big mainstream type label, but a label that has some artists that are at least out there getting things done. The internet continues to evolve yet these digital retailers and labels continue to stay exactly the same and at some point I think will be their downfall if they don't start re-thinking some of these practices. It's only going to take one spark to set off that fire that sends these companies to the ground.

[symmetricalsounds]

In a perfect world, I don't think the internet would exist.

dude your perfect world must be a horrible place...

[wirez]

In a perfect world, I don't think the internet would exist.

dude your perfect world must be a horrible place...

Not at all. It's just a very organic place. Lots of love making, living off the land and playing from instruments made from elements of the earth.

I'm beginning to feel like there's nothing I'd miss from the internet. It's the biggest load of unproductive shit ever to be created that has in effect ruined many peoples lives, Ie. Owners of stores like Woolworth's. I would go on to say other family businesses but then I'd look like a fool for disregarding store chains. It's certainly ruined the music industry to an extent it doesn't look like it's going to pull out of with ease.

I come to my computer, I sit in front of my computer, I do a routine of the same thing I do every day, I meet no new people, I get depressed, I get fat, I get unhealthy, I get lazy, I go out and meet new people and look like a slob, I get more depressed, I spend more time on the internet, I get a headache.

What is so good about the internet?!

[symmetricalsounds]

In a perfect world, I don't think the internet would exist.

dude your perfect world must be a horrible place...

Not at all. It's just a very organic place. Lots of love making, living off the land and playing from instruments made from elements of the earth.

shit sounds wack na not wack, but i don't think i'd trade all the great stuff we have now for that even if it does come with a lot of shit attached.

internet = greatest human invention ever

regardless if most of the bandwidth is used for porn it's still amazing.

[wirez]

I made an edit, please read

[JFK]

I know this isnt particularly helpful or constructive but:

Prince is the faggiest looking bloke I have ever laid eyes on and his music is gay beyond belief.

That is all. Carry on.

[Sirius]

I know this isnt particularly helpful or constructive but:

Prince is the faggiest looking bloke I have ever laid gay beyond belief.

That is all on.

[JBE]

I know this isnt particularly helpful or constructive but:

Prince is the faggiest looking bloke I have ever laid eyes on and his music is gay beyond belief.

That is all. Carry on.

This is how you dance to dubstep

[symmetricalsounds]

@wirez

if you hate the internet so much maybe you shouldn't use it?

i love the effect internet has had on music, i don't care about woolworths closing down they were shit anyways. it's unfortunate a lot of indie record stores have gone down but then my local one is still going strong and has even started stocking more vinyl and more variety in the last 2/3 years . so i think there is definitely something to be said for good stores being able to keep their shit going.

i love the fact that learning anything has become so simple, you can whine all you like about that diluting things down but i don't think that matters because great stuff always rises. the simple fact that these things are more accessible to everyone instead of just rich fucks is a great thing.

i love the fact that loads of people who previously didn't have friends now have loads, they may only speak to these people through teamspeak and meet up once a year but hey, at least they now have a social circle.

i love the fact that every stupid daft ridiculous niche of humanity is being documented.

i love the fact things like second life exist, and that if i wanted i could go hang out in a virtual ankh-morpork that someone has meticulously modelled.

i love the fact that people's passions now have a place to be aired, no longer does someone make something cool and it sits in their basement for a while then gets broken up into pieces for the next project. now that project can blaze round the internet for a few months and make people smile and appreciate that persons creation.

i love how the internet has accelerated progress in certain artforms, i'm sure it's happened in loads but the object manipulation scene (juggling/poi/staff/CJ) has literally rocketed since the net. people being in isolated places in the middle of nowhere, disconnected from everyone else into this niche past-time now have forums where they connect, where the technical aspects of the artform can be discussed, refined and concreted into foundations which can be built on. somebody can watch a video of someone a 100,000 miles away and be inspired by one particular aspect of that video then go away and extend this one aspect into a whole new family of moves, that scenario could happen within a week and the effect becomes exponential.

i could go on, but it's already close to tl:dr for this forum

it does sound like you need a break from the net, maybe the internet just isn't good for you or maybe the routine you've got into is what is messing with you.

time to take a bath