NPG Music Club

» see npgmusicclub.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Seven dollars and seventy-seven cents a month, or ninety nine for the year. That was the price of being inside Prince's internet when the NPG Music Club opened on 14 February 2001, four years before anyone had heard of YouTube and two years before the iTunes Store. The pitch was that the label was no longer in the way. You paid the artist, the artist handed you the music, and the record industry found out about it the same time you did.

It worked for most of five years. Membership reached roughly 400,000. Albums were released into the club before they reached shops, and concert tickets and soundchecks were sold through it. By the third year there was a twenty five dollar lifetime tier for the people who had decided this arrangement was permanent. In June 2006 the Webbys gave Prince a lifetime achievement award and gave the club itself Best Celebrity/Fan Site. He accepted in five words: "Everything you think is true."

On 3 July 2006, HM Publishing Holdings filed a trademark complaint. The claim was that NPG, which to Prince meant the New Power Generation, belonged to the Nature Publishing Group, a British science publisher with no obvious interest in funk. The site went dark about a day later, on 4 July. Prince's attorney called the timing a coincidence and said the club had closed because it had gone as far as it could go in its current form. Both statements may be true. Neither of them returned anything to the lifetime members.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a membership actually bought ~

The club was not a store with a login. It was closer to a private radio station run by one person with no schedule and no obligation to explain himself. Songs appeared as downloads when he felt like releasing them. Entire albums went to members first. There were spoken messages and long instrumental pieces that never appeared anywhere else, several of which exist today only because somebody's hard drive outlived the service.

That is the part that was new in 2001. Paying a musician directly for a continuous feed of work is now an ordinary business with its own product category. Prince was doing it a decade early, badly documented, with a payment page that most of the world could not use.

~ the distance from here ~

In 2001 I was seventeen, in Turkey, on a 56k line that I shared with the telephone. The club was not expensive by American standards, but a yearly charge in dollars on an American website needed a credit card cleared for international payments, and that was not a thing a high school student in Ankara had lying around. Even if it had been, the club's whole point was audio you downloaded, and the download was the part my connection could not supply. I read about what members were getting. That was the entire relationship.

~ what came after ~

Prince replaced it with 3121.com later the same year and with Lotusflow3r after that, and his relationship with the internet kept souring until he was issuing takedowns against fans who posted concert clips. The subscription idea survived him. Everything that now sells a direct line between a musician and the people who pay for the work is running the NPG Music Club's business model with better plumbing and a terms of service that explains what happens when the artist gets bored.

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