[mousepod]

What's "innovative" is that Prince is "giving away" his entire album in a lossless format before it goes on sale in stores (or not, as his label seems to have decided).

Ever since he got out of his deal with Warner Bros., he's retained the rights to all his own recordings. He's made several distribution deals with larger companies. Most of the time, they figure that a deal with Prince is still worthwhile because they'll at least make a couple of bucks on the release and have the publicity cache of working with an icon.

Two records ago, Prince decided that he would exploit a loophole in Billboard Magazine's US charts, and make a $1 purchase of his CD a mandatory part of the ticket price for his concerts. The initial result was hugely inflated album sales figures (each concertgoer received a copy of the disc in a simple cardboard sleeve as they entered the club or arena). The eventual outcome is that Billboard changed the rules about how such a deal would effect the album charts.

This latest bit is a great publicity stunt. I'm sure that he got a ton of dough from the newspaper to allow them to include his CD. Once the furor dies down, there will of course be copies in the record stores. And people in the US are actually talking about Prince and the fact that he has a new album.