The Real Reason Prince Changed His Name In The 90s Will Surprise You

In 1993 the artist Prince changed his name to "The Artist Formally Known as Prince", and most people thought it was just a publicity stunt. But there was actually a very strong financial reason for this change and Cory Doctorow co-author of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back tells us why.

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Check out more from the MR crew:

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I am just the prince thing. I never lived through it. It's never like I know if you know like it was sort of always in the background. Like you changed his name. I just assumed oh he just did that because he's trying to be wacky. But that wasn't it at all. We're talking of course about the musician. Let's just start there just because I was like oh my God why didn't I ever even contemplate why he'd done this. But walk us through why Prince changed his name as an example of what is now I think much more even widespread than it was then. Yeah and I'm going to try and do this without getting into too much eye-watering detail. In the book that we wrote Chokepoint Capitalism we kind of spends the first half unpicking these very Baroque scams. You know where John Oliver's style dissection of these different kinds of accounting frauds. And the record industry is Rife with them. You know the point of going through all of these is to realize that they're not hard to understand because they're complicated. They're complicated precisely so that they'll be hard to understand. so the record industry has long been a source of very bad Contracting terms for artists. And you know part of our thesis in the book is that it doesn't really matter how much copyright you give to artists if there's only a couple of labels and if they demand that you just turn over all that copyright signs to them. And Prince is a very good example of that. So just as with most other artists Prince had to sign away all of his rights to sign up with the label. And he had to finance the production of his own music. When you sign a deal with the label you get an advance that's supposed to pay for your rent and your groceries while you're recording. And then you also have charged to your account all the expenses associated with that recording. So they tell you what studio to use and what engineers and what sidemen. And they charge you for all of that often at rates that they get to determine and often rates that are much higher than the market rate. And then you start earning it back. And you earn it back in the form of royalties. And The royalties are extraordinarily low. They were better off in prison than they were for say The Beatles who got one penny per LP that they split four ways minus 15 for breakage and 10 for their manager. But they were still extremely low. And what that meant is that Prince could make millions and millions of dollars for the labels and still owe hundreds of thousands of dollars for or even Millions for his production.