
Prince, a Master of Playing Music and Distributing It - erickhill
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/arts/music/prince-music-technology-distribution.html
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exodust
> _" prince.org crashed.... The site is a remnant of an earlier Internet, with
> an ancient design not built for the speed and density of the modern online
> world."_

The author is unaware these "ancient designs" are lightweight and actually
better suited to speed and traffic. The site crashing has nothing to do with
an outdated design and everything to do with the hosting plan the site is on.

The big story (IMHO) not mentioned here, is all the unheard and unreleased
songs and videos he locked away in his vault. In a fascinating and hilarious
story told by Kevin Smith, he describes how he briefly worked with Prince on a
documentary. Smith met a Producer for Prince who told him she'd produced more
than 50 Prince music videos of songs nobody has heard and videos nobody has
seen. All locked away in the vault. I really like how crazy this is, and hope
they are released.

The story told by Smith is about 30 min long, but worth it if you're curious
about how odd Prince was, and up for a laugh:
[https://youtu.be/8LhcParuzpc](https://youtu.be/8LhcParuzpc)

If you just want to see a really good example of Prince doing what he does
best, with awesome female drummer and rockin band, turn this up loud:
[https://youtu.be/nyyS0FSztKc](https://youtu.be/nyyS0FSztKc)

~~~
tamana
Those ancient pages could be hosted on a scalable CDN to hand the traffic. The
hosting design is antiquated, not the pages.

~~~
exodust
I've never heard the term "hosting design" before! As a charitable gesture
let's assume that's what was meant rather than "looks old so must therefore
run like a 1974 Datsun".

~~~
exclusiv
I haven't heard that before either, but I think we engineers have associated
design with the look and feel when it's broader than that.

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tzs
In some ways, though, he was apparently a master of _not_ distributing music.

I heard a story today on my local NPR station where they interviewed the maker
of the documentary "Hunting for Prince's Vault". Many years ago once of
Prince's engineers set up a vault to keep all of Prince's unreleased material.
(And they made it a literal vault...complete with the kind of door you find in
banks).

It was interesting. Prince was apparently pretty much always writing new
songs, and making studio recordings of them, and promo videos for them...but
then not releasing them. People would find him in the studio recording on
holidays and ask why he was working on a holiday, and he'd tell them he wasn't
working.

From what it sounds like, he wrote and recorded music the way Isaac Asimov
wrote. It was what made him happy and what he wanted to be doing all the time.

As far as the documentary maker was able to figure out from talking to
Prince's engineers and collaborators and such, the vault contains enough
finished and recorded songs for over 100 albums, plus a couple full length
movies, music videos, promo video, concert footage.

~~~
bherms
There's a good Kevin Smith story (though long) about Prince hiring him to make
a documentary... Smith basically took time out of his busy schedule because he
was star struck, spent a bunch of time with Prince, made a documentary and
then asked his assistant what the plan was, when they wanted to release,
etc... She laughed and just said essentially that it would never see the light
of day and was just going into his vault with all the other stuff.

edit: exodust mentions this below as well

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vessenes
I have a vague worry that Prince's estate will be instructed to destroy
everything in the vault. That would be a major loss to 20th century cultural
music heritage. But, it would be in keeping with Prince's MO, someone who
largely did as he liked and stayed true to his artistic vision.

Anyway, hopefully instead we'll have 10 years of new Prince albums as they go
through the vault bit by bit.

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grillvogel
pretty much every prince everything is sold out on amazon.com right now.

