Prince — Royal Negotiator
There are few modern popular artists as talented and as world-changing as Prince. That means the impact of his passing holds a contradiction: We each feel it uniquely as our own experience, yet our sense of loss unites us. My personal experience of Prince’s life and work calls me to pay homage not just to the music he made, but also to how he lived his life as a creator – particularly how he forcefully defended his creative process and output.
So many artists and creatives are taken advantage of when it comes to earning the money they need to continue their work. Sometimes this downfall is by self-foiling, and sometimes it’s by the dirty deeds of others, most often the varied businesspeople around them. The New Yorker’s recent article about Paul McCartney points out how Allen Klein, one of The Beatles’ managers, manipulated artists’ desire for money, all the while understanding the real control, and, therefore, sustenance in the business of art is in ownership. In Prince, the roles of artist and businessperson were equally married. This committed relationship is unusual — my current work helping creatives learn how to negotiate is based on its rarity — but it can be learned. Here are three things I think Prince did well:
He was committed to his gift.
A lot of people are talented — many more than will ever see success. That success is achieved only if the artist maintains a certain kind of awareness and drive to create, produce, even fail, and continue to work to push that talent out into the world. Prince seemed to know he had an unusual gift. I don’t know if he was born with a powerful business sense, but my guess is that he developed it in obligation to his talent. He knew what he had was unique, and he knew it had to be protected and nurtured.
He did his damnedest to control his work.
Prince famously protested the terms of his business deals, including who owned the masters. In his longstanding dispute with Warner Bros. Records, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and wrote “slave” on his face for public appearances. That enslaved self put out music for Warner Bros. in keeping with his contract, but the free man made art the way he wanted to. And when Prince felt like he could partner with Warner Bros. as an equal, he signed with them again. I was personally deeply influenced by Prince’s demand that he be able to reach his audience without the interference of management and intermediaries. I read he even did this as a negotiator, conducting business with a minimal buffer of attorneys.
Sign o’ the Times – and ahead of his time.
Prince was hip to piracy, offering music through his own online service, NPG Music Club, launched in 2001. Check out saved pages on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a reminder of early online design. The interface looks dated now, but NPG Music Club was way ahead of its time. It never saw great success, but its audaciousness is a Prince hallmark. More recently, Prince removed his catalogs from YouTube and Spotify, and signed on with Jay Z’s Tidal, a music subscription service that pays better royalties to artists than other services.
Prince was utterly purposeful in his art-making, but I think his highest purpose was freedom. In his commitment to artistic freedom, he was perhaps less committed to any individual work of art than he was to the right to make art. That commitment, his millions of dollars in silent charitable giving, and, of course, his art are his enduring gifts for us all.
