Follow Up Emails

So later that day I hesitantly respond to Meron and she responds back:

After Meron’s response, my concerns about the legitimacy of this call grew exponentially. The email was once again very hazy.

Nothing was answered.

Who was I really dealing with? All I got back was a request to get on a call, so I decide not to email back — and go on with my life.

Two days later, on the way to a friends, my phone rings with a blocked number.

I answer the call, it’s a voice I don’t recognize: it’s Meron.

Meron is following up about getting on the phone. At that moment I was busy and told her to send me an email and I would get back to her with a time. What did I care. I once again ask her what the phone call was in regards to and she responds with, “He will tell you, it’s about his music.”

What?

She can’t be serious.

Prince wants to talk with me about his music?

Later that evening I have an email from her with a time for the call. I guess she’s trying to tell me who’s boss. But I can roll with this punch.

I once again ask for specifics about the topic of the call and if Prince is actually the one I will be speaking with. Once again the response was, “About his music on your website” and “yes, you will be speaking with Prince.”

So at this point I am going to bed at night thinking that I might have a call scheduled the next day at 1pm with…. His Royal Highness, Prince!

It can’t be. Is this real?

Call Preparation

So just in case this call is real I begin the mental Rocky workout.

I have always been a huge Prince fan so I looked up his most recent works: Albums, Tours etc. I also had the mindset that if he was really calling me, it was going to be a conversation about his music being uploaded to our site in the past.

Based on Prince’s reputation in the music industry and how he handles his music catalog (Just check out the Google results for Prince Copyright ), I was expecting to get berated.

Despite my preconceived thoughts on what the call was going to be about, the goal for me was to not only figure out how we can work with Prince and his Record Label moving forward, but to also come up with a custom solution for him to effectively control and monetize his work.

The Call

So I take Prince off speaker phone and it soaks in;

this is really Prince.

I proceed to tell him it was a pleasure and an honor and how much I love his music , my Purple Rain (The Movie) T-Shirt — I’m still allowed to be a fan, right?

We get down to business.

He starts off by mentioning that we have some of his music catalog on our site illegally. I bring up the past circumstances and mentioned to him how we have handled it.

He counters with, “There’s still some of my music catalog on our platform.”

I have nothing to hide, nothing to defend. I’m here to help. So, I mention that if his team could put together a list of the urls where his music is located, we would gladly remove it straight away.

A silent pause makes me think he’s turning Hulk green on the receiving end.

He then begins speaking about his distaste,

“Copyrighted music continues to be recklessly posted online.”

I agreed with him and mention to him that it has not only been an ongoing battle for us, but for every UGC music-based website.

I give him my take on the digital music landscape — I realize this is an epidemic for all artists across the globe and has spread for more then a decade and is still an ongoing, uphill battle.

History has shown that solutions put in place to combat piracy are always a step behind piracy tactics. Pirates always seem to be full strides in front of the Music Industry.

I mentioned to Prince, “Instead of directly trying to combat piracy, we should explore and implement various tech solutions that will enable him to take more control of his music in order to monetize it more efficiently.”

At this point Prince jumps in before I could get to some of the ideas I had in mind.

He did not want to discuss any ideas I had in mind until we addressed the matter at hand: removing his music from our website.

He firmly disagreed with me and felt that piracy was something that can and must come to an end.

“Scott piracy is something we can and will put to end. People like you and I can help win this battle.”

He shares with me that some of his music had recently been stolen and his live shows are now being illegally recorded and distributed online. He mentioned that his 30+ years of timeless music and shows are being distributed frequently online without his consent.

He gets into the Digital Music landscape and asks me, “Are you aware that my entire catalog of music has been removed from most of the major digital platforms, such as: Spotify, Tidal, Pandora?”

He mentioned that the digital music industry is making it tough for musicians to make a living off of their hard work and talent and I couldn’t agree more. One example he mentioned was that Spotify was only paying approximately $0.14 cents per 1,000 streams.

He then asked me if we were monitoring each and every single upload on our platform. I don’t get star struck often but let me remind you this is Prince, a legend.

With caution, I had to tell him that, unfortunately, no.

That despite our company being around for 7 years, we are still a small yet growing team without the resources to do so.

After hearing his insightful (and informative) view on the business side of his music and the music industry for 15 minutes, he then proceeds to tell me he was sorry for being so long winded…

Keep talking Mr. Prince. Gather up some more of that wind and continue on :)

All jokes aside, after listening to him, it is evident that he is not happy with the current digital music landscape and what he described a couple of times as his music being “Pimped.”

PIMPED

And he’s right.

What I also took out of this conversation was that he is not just one of the most talented musicians of all time, but a “very” smart and savvy businessman. For those not in the music industry, or those who don’t know too much about the music industry, Prince owns his entire music catalog.

He actually owns the rights to all of his music.

After hearing him speak about the business side of his music and hearing the passion and importance that a lifetime worth of work means to him, it became less and less of a surprise that he personally called me.

While I realize there was a business component to him calling me personally, it is also impressive that he has such a passion for protecting his work. He could of easily had his legal team or employees reach out to address the issue.

Back to the call

After hearing everything he had to say — I now had an opportunity to present him with solutions. “Piracy is an ongoing battle with no end in sight, so the mind set of our company as well as others is figuring out long term solutions that will minimize the impact piracy has on artists.”

I then presented to him several ideas I had in mind that he could utilize to give him a 100% control of his music and how it would be distributed and monetized on our platform.

Despite the strong solutions I presented to him, it was not a conversation that he wanted to have.

Prince is not impressed.

The fact of the matter is that Prince has problems with the way his music catalog is being used by his fans online.

Prince, without a doubt, needs a better solution to fix the problem at hand.

Despite spending, what he said was “a lot” of money on this battle, he didn’t want to hear it.

His solution, which naturally pushes away the online community, has not been working out to well for him.

It was obvious, even with the ideas I presented to him, Prince was going to stay course.