Prince Likely to be "Completely Destroyed" by Free-Music "System"

From Greg Sandoval, CNET News:

He was among the first major recording artists to sell music online. This summer, Prince distributed more than 2 million free copies of his album Planet Earth as part of a newspaper promotion in the United Kingdom. Last year, he was honored with a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for his "visionary use of the Internet to distribute music."

But Prince, one of America's most successful recording artists for three decades, seems to have had a dramatic change of heart. Within the next few days, he is expected to cap an aggressive two-month legal campaign to protect his copyright by suing The Pirate Bay, a popular BitTorrent tracking site best known for helping people find unauthorized copies of music and movies. As reported Friday by CNET News.com, Prince plans to sue The Pirate Bay in three countries for encouraging copyright violations--the United States, France, and Sweden, where the Pirate Bay is based.

File sharers who are now cursing Prince should remember that for nearly 10 years he has tried to solve a problem that has stumped the beleaguered record industry: how can you make money from digital music?

Prince was the first major artist to distribute an album exclusively online, though he later decided to release the record on disc. He continued releasing music over the Web after leaving his record label, Warner Bros., in the mid-1990s. It was only last summer, after giving away millions of albums for free, that a spokesman told The New York Times that "Prince's only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it."

Some believe Prince was disappointed by his online experiments. Whatever revenue he generated from Web sales doesn't appear to have been enough to prevent him from going to the record labels for help distributing his music on CD. Sony was due to release Planet Earth in the United Kingdom this year but backed out when Prince inked a deal with Britain's Sunday Mail to include a copy of the album with every newspaper circulated on July 15. The promotion also angered the country's music retailers.

Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America, said Prince should expect to take some public-relations hits. After all, a headline about him suing the mother alongside a photo of a baby boy bopping to a snippet of Prince's music just isn't going to play well. But Carnes argues this is another example of how file sharers persecute the victim. If Prince is mistakenly chasing mothers and their home movies, Carnes points out, it's likely an unfortunate mistake brought about by his attempts to protect his music from more lethal threats.

"Of course there is a risk to Prince," Carnes said. "Prince is going to be completely destroyed on the Internet by the system that they got in place to dismantle artists who speak up for their rights. Do a Google search on Lars Ulrich. Look at all of the millions of negative things they wrote about him. It's all right. We're used to it."

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