Full digital albums were also released, starting with Xpectation on 1 January 2003, NPG Music Club issued three additional member exclusive albums in Year Four – The Chocolate Invasion, The Slaughterhouse – albeit reissuing tracks already available on the service, and C-Note.īelow is the full chronology of exclusive CDs and every digital audio track available to Premium members from the Musicology Download Store at .2002: One Nite Alone. A fourth, N.E.W.S, was the club’s sole music release in Year Three. Three of the four CDs materialised as One Nite Alone…, and One Nite Alone… Live! with its companion disk The Aftershow: It Ain’t Over! issued together as a boxset. From Year Two (14 February 2002), technical complexities led to the club abandoning MP3 downloads and instead promised members four exclusive physical CDs to be issued throughout the year, as well as the best seats at Prince’s concerts and early access to soundchecks. – illustration by Sam Jennings Exclusive albumsĭespite being primarily a download service, the highlight of Year One was the fan club exclusive CD release of Rave In2 The Joy Fantastic. Over its five years of operation, as concept for a digital streaming service laid the foundation of the legal distribution of music for the Internet age. In an email to subscribers Prince claimed the “NPGMC gone as far as it can go” citing its culmination with the Webby win. Prince saw NPG Music Club had simply outlived its original purpose.
The reality was that albeit Prince could simply relaunch the platform under an alternative name, having rekindled his past commercial success with Musicology in 2004, by 2006 Prince was looking to re-establish his position as a major artist and reach a larger audience, particularly at that time he was living in LA and with a new album out that March. But following a name copyright lawsuit filed by the Nature Publishing Group on 3 July 2006 NPG Music Club was taken down within hours. On 12 June 2006, NPG Music Club won recognition with the Webby Award for Best Celebrity/Fan Website. underwent a final relaunch on 1 January 2004, providing a sleeker interface as well as all of Prince’s music recorded under the auspices of NPG Records and as an independent artist up to that time was made available for purchase through the website. NPG Music Club underwent a further revamp on, with its downloads available but sold at a discount and only usually before their commercial release. Each month, NPG Music Club offered subscribers around three MP3s and one hour long ‘Ahdio show’ (Prince was making podcasts long before they became a thing) and eleven such Ahdio shows were issued during the club’s first year of operation. At a time when most artists simply maintained Myspace profiles, Prince launched the NPG Music Club on the premise to “eliminate the middleman” in result of his on-going feud Warner Brothers. The club’s model was absolutely pioneering. But by April that year the player was dropped in favour of a browser-based platform and became a subscription service at $7.77 per month (reduced in 2004 to $2.50) or to Premium members for a one-off lifetime fee of $100 (reduced to $25 from 2003). The website’s purpose was to create a robust method of music distribution without the industry middleman but in a manner that would protect his copyright against digital piracy, therefore the digital signature of the downloaded tracks could only be read in the player. The platform was designed by his webmaster Sam Jennings and built by Ash Warren and was launched as complete with its own bolt-on software-based music player. NPG Music Club (NPGMC) was Prince‘s official website and members’ download store/fan club between 14 February 2001 and 4 July 2006, taking over its previous incarnation.
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