“After a second computer failure left him without a means to record his album and no money to buy a replacement, Prince finished recording the vocals and backing instrumental tracks for his new album entirely in [Apple Store SoHo],” Matthew Narvin reports for The Daily Beast.
“Prince Harvey sang, hummed, and rapped into a display computer at the SoHo Apple Store every weekday for four consecutive months,” Narvin reports. “The album, after all, is called PHATASS — an acronym for Prince Harvey At The Apple Store: SoHo.”
Narvin reports, “Prince made the Apple Store a second home, befriending a pair of employees who would bend corporate rules to help him record the album. ‘I’m not gonna say their names because they might get in trouble,’ he says. ‘But if one of them wasn’t there, the other one was.'”
Much more, including a track from he album, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We admire the initiative!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Apple recording studio?
Creative. I’ve heard of at least one person writing a book at an Apple Store.
This is nothing new. Back in 2000 when I worked for a big-box musical instrument retailer, we had knuckleheads like this trying to pull this crap all of the time on floor model sequencers. It got to where I had to impose a time limit on people ‘auditioning’ gear.
What chaps me about this, is guy made his album for free, and now wants to make money off of it. Its a perfect example of the entitlement culture of today’s youth. If this guy was passionate about his music, but also had scruples, he would have scratched and saved to get the money together for either the gear or the studio time to pursue his work. Instead he shamelessly games the system, and people are giving him fucking kudos for it.
Sad…
He was down on his luck and found a creative way to get the job done, apparently with unofficial support from a couple of Apple Store employees. As long as it did not unduly inconvenience anyone, I don’t have any problem with it. In fact, it seems rather in keeping with the original Apple garage mentality.
A long time ago I advocated for Apple to start an independent “label” to encourage new artists to develop music for iTunes. The label could provide more generous revenue sharing with the artists than is typical in the industry because the overhead would be very low. In return, Apple would receive exclusive distribution rights for a period of time. Sounds like a win-win to me.
So who owns the music?
Ah, yeah… Gruv mate, I wouldn’t be worried about the money he’s going to make out of it. At $0.002 every time someone streams one of the songs it’ll probably be quite a while before he recoups even one bus ticket to the Apple store.
Prince who?
“Prince, hardly…”