Word: warners
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...Warner Bros...
Shortly after he signed a $60 million contract with Warner Bros. in 1992, Prince scrawled the word slave on his face, changed his name to a symbol and announced that he was retiring from recorded music. The problem was that he had a backlog of 450 songs he felt the world wanted to hear, and Warner Bros. simply refused to flood the market with that much product. Commercial suicide, the company said. In one of his last public acts before locking himself away in Paisley Park, his hermitage just west of Minneapolis, Minn., Prince stood before an awards-show audience...
...decade later, Warner Bros. and the other record-industry giants are flat-lining, and Prince is doing a happy dance that would make Snoopy look like a depressive. In the past two months, he has opened the Grammy Awards with Beyonce Knowles, been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, launched a sold-out arena tour, opened an iTunes-ish music-download store to go along with his successful, subscription-based NPG Music Club and released Musicology, his best album...
...tempting to call this resurgence a victory lap for free-spirited artists over the big, bad corporations, but that would be giving Prince too much--and too little--credit. He may have briefly adopted the language of artistic brotherhood in his fight with Warner, but Prince didn't pick up the face pencil to fight for the Hoobastanks and Josh Grobans of the world. The principle at stake was never creative Utopianism: it was narcissism. Prince believed that he was a genius and that his tiniest musical doodle merited commercial attention. (He even declined to do phone interviews, saying...
...largest long-distance carrier in the U.S., promises to bring the technology into the mainstream. "AT&T's entry should broadly legitimize VOIP for residential customers," says Steve Koppman, principal analyst for Gartner Group Dataquest. Research firm InStat/MDR estimates that as more major players, including Cablevision, Comcast and Time Warner Cable (a sister company of TIME), roll out their announced VOIP services, the number of residential VOIP subscribers will rise from about 135,000 at the end of 2003 to 3.9 million...