A couple of weeks ago I wrote about U2's subscription model; now Prince has announced something similar.
According to Newsweek, Prince's new site LotusFlow3r.com will offer an annual subscription of $77, which will allow members to download 3 new albums (two from Prince, one from a protege), plus all sorts of other material over the course of a year. (The picture comes from them too).
There's not much to see on the site so far - it launches officially on the 24th March - but you can play 3 new tracks, including Colonized Mind, which is an excellent slow bluesy thing.
I've been writing about music a lot recently, and there are two reasons for this. The first is that the music industry is now using some very imaginative ways of marketing and pricing, and also of using their communities of fans. We've come along way from Marillion using the internet to get fans to pre-pay for their album Marillion.com, as detailed inMichael Lewis' book Next: The Future Just Happened
The second is that I subscribe to the excellent DigitalMusicNews newsletter, which keeps me up to date with these things. Highly recommended!
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