Last week we reported that Prince had declared the internet to be a fad and that it was ‘over’. He also explained that he didn’t like dealing with iTunes as “they won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”
Conveniently, Prince was talking exclusively to a journalist from UK tabloid the Daily Mirror who happened to be giving away his new album 20Ten free with its Saturday edition last weekend. With figures now rolling in, it appears that the Prince CD attached to the cover on July 10 boosted sales of the Daily Mirror by 334,000 in comparison to the previous Saturday.
The publishers won’t say what figure the previous Saturday’s sales were, but the average daily figure in May according to circulation audits was just under 1.3 million. If Prince had achieved those figures by sales, he would have pissed it in to Number 1, as barely 70,000 album sales in a week are needed to hit number one on the UK albums charts.
If it’s any consolation for Prince, the internet still cares about him, even if he not it. Taking a quick look, there are 300 seeds of his new album on Isohunt pumping out up to 1,000 illegal download copies of his new album every hour, while the Pirate Bay has just under 500 seeds of the album doing a similarly brisk trade. Prince can do the maths.
