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The New York Times ran an interesting profile on Prince the other week which shows how he is changing the landscape of pop music - at least how it's getting distributed:

As recording companies bemoan a crumbling market, Prince is demonstrating that charisma and the willingness to go out and perform are still bankable. He doesn't have to go multiplatinum - he's multiplatform. His career is heading into its third decade, and he could have long since become a nostalgia act. Instead he figured out early how to do what he wants in a 21st-century music business, and clearly what he wants is to make more music.

The article continues,

Like most pop stars, he goes on major tours to coincide with album releases, which for Prince are frequent. But he also gets out and performs whenever he chooses. Last year he took over a club in Las Vegas and renamed it 3121, after his 2006 album "3121," which briefly hit No. 1 and spawned multiple conflicting theories about the significance of the number. He started playing there twice a week for 900 people at $125 a ticket. In February he had an audience in the millions as the halftime entertainment for the Super Bowl. He has gone on to play well-publicized shows at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood for a few hundred people paying $3,121 per couple, and another elite show last weekend in East Hampton for about $3,000 per person.

And this is the best part of the story:

In Britain he infuriated retailers by agreeing to have a newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, include the complete "Planet Earth" CD in copies on July 15. Presumably The Mail paid him something in the range of what he could have earned, much more slowly, through album sales. After the newspaper giveaway was announced, Columbia Records' corporate parent, Sony Music, chose not to release "Planet Earth" for retail sale in Britain.

Yes! Stick it to 'em, Prince!

Check out the rest of the article...it won't disappoint you.

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