It took me years until I finally learned why he did that. It had something to do with the music industry owning his name. He reclaimed ownership of all his music and art and made a departure from the extortionate music industry.
In the early 1990s, Prince was embroiled in a contractual dispute with Warner Bros., his record company. He felt they were restraining his creativity by not allowing him to release albums as frequently as he desired. In 1993, in an act of rebellion, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, which was a combination of the male and female gender symbols, in order to free himself from his contract obligations to Warner Bros. Since the symbol had no pronunciation, he was often referred to as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” during that period. He returned to using the name Prince in 2000, after his publishing contract with Warner Bros. expired.
Prince literally wanted us to call him a symbol with no explanation.
It took me years until I finally learned why he did that. It had something to do with the music industry owning his name. He reclaimed ownership of all his music and art and made a departure from the extortionate music industry.
Could’ve picked something easier to pronounce, though.
It was actually brilliant. Got everyone talking about him without really giving up ‘Prince’ in the public consciousness.
Never thought of it that way but yeah. Gave up his name without actually giving it up. Brilliant. That guy was savy as fuck. Also a genius.
He chose an unpronouncable symbol because it allowed him to break his recording contract.
I seeee! Never heard the finer details of that whole thing (I was young and not super into his stuff anyway). Smart guy though by the sounds of it!
I asked GPT why:
https://goldiesparade.co.uk/new-power-generation/#:~:text=Prince felt so constrained by,the contract and with Warner.
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The comment is talking about prince.
I am le stupid
The unpronounceable symbol :
Hollow circle above downward arrow crossed with a curlicued horn-shaped symbol and then a short bar
(known to fans as the “Love Symbol”)
I’m in awe of the outstanding quality of the symbols pic
24 x 28 pixels, 320 bytes, from Wikipedia…
Prince_logo.svg.webp
… if it really was SVG format it would be much greater quality.
They may have made the classic “let’s batch-optimize all images for the web” or maybe using a CDN provider, either with wrong settings.
Yeah SVG would make it almost endlessly scalable.
Maybe you know, did he want to be called “the artist”? And then everyone added “formerly known as Prince”?