Prince: Internet’s dead. And here’s a free CD in your newspaper

Hard to tell if the irony is intentional or not, but the Artist Currently Known as Prince has declared the Internet fad pretty much over. For good measure, he’s providing copies of his new CD in several British newspapers (the paper version, naturally). One of the papers not invited to the party, the Globe and Mail, provides  an appropriately snarky report.

Reminds me of a mini-trend maybe 10 years ago, when some newspapers decided the best strategy for meeting the challenge of the Internet was to provide each day’s paper on a shiny new CD-ROM. Maybe get newspaper readers to just pop in a disk and ignore that Internet thing.

Prince (and newspapers) are certainly free to dictate how and when people can consume their output. But as they say: it’s wiser to fish where the fish are.

People interested in news and music are online. Certainly fans of a particular newspaper, or a particular musical artist, will go out of their way to feed their passion…. But what about all the other fish?