Everyone, everywhere, has felt the weight of Prince’s sudden passing. Fans and celebrities have all joined together to share tributes and personal stories explaining what he meant to them, including Frank Ocean, The Game and even the President Of The United States. Along with the beautiful words that have been shared on social media, plenty of musicians have honoured the singer with musical tributes.
Another thing that has come following his death is a surge in music sales. The first two spots on the Billboard Top 200 charts have been filed with The Very Best Of Prince and Purple Rain. To put it in numbers, 179 000 and 69 000 albums were sold, respectively. According to Billboard, the tracking week for the current countdown ended on the day of his death. This shows just how quickly fans got their hands on each Prince album, getting them to their respective places on the chart.
The Internet has limited access to Prince’s albums, due to his tough stance on streaming. He had softened this stance slightly in the last year when he released his final album HITnRUN exclusively on Tidal.
Why just Tidal? As Stereogum reports, Prince had previously said:
“Tidal has] a million-plus subscribers. Spotify has 10. So if you imagine a million people in front of you? That’s a lot of people. So you gotta talk to them and you getting ready to drop something and all of ‘em are gonna get it. What do you wanna say? How are you gonna move all of ‘em? Oh, now it gets interesting. It’s always going to be the peanut gallery and that’s all right.
My thing is this. The catalog has to be protected. And some of our fans were actually disingenuous. Taking the time to get their playlists together and yeah, it’s gone. Now you got to actually go subscribe to get the music that you lost on Spotify. Spotify wasn’t paying, so you gotta shut it down.”
Even so, we still have plenty of music out there to keep our love for The Purple One alive. Listen to Prince’s final live performance here.
Image: Music Feeds