New online museum launches to honor Prince's websites
Prince's memory is being honored on stages, stereos and social media platforms across the world, but now the Purple One's history with the web has finally been preserved and honored digitally.
The Prince Online Museum, launched on July 4, is an assembly of his official websites and spans 20 years of his career.
The archive honors Prince's digital legacy by allowing viewers to view a timeline that chronicles the different sites created by Prince—from a walkthrough of the CD-ROM interactive experience (Prince's first digital foray) to many iterations of his NPG Music Club.
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“Other than the music, there is another side to Prince, which was his fierce independence and wanting to connect directly with his audience without any middlemen," Sam Jennings told The New York Times.
The online museum, which was created for no cost and available to view for free, is a fascinating lens to examine Prince's career, and an incredible archive of the many ways in which he harnessed the power of the web to cultivate a direct connection to his fans. He did not have a site at the time of his death (Twitter was his only active platform) and was a fierce protecter of his work being used online beyond his control.
“I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else," he told The Daily Mirror in 2010. "They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it."
Today Tidal is the only streaming service where his catalogue can be found.
Jennings, who spearheaded the project, worked with the late artist for nearly a decade and helped create many of the platforms featured on the timeline—like the 2006 Webby Award winning NPG Music Club, a digital experience launched in 2001 for fans that provided videos and radio shows for an annual subscription.
"With the spread of the internet in the mid-90s, Prince saw a path forward that could completely circumvent the established distribution channels that had been monopolized by these corporate structures for decades," the site states. NPG Music Club is a strong example of that path forward.
Throughout the online museum, visitors can read thoughts on various sites by those who helped to create them. While not all of the original sites are not active, the online museum has a collection of working versions of some sites, screenshots and video tours of certain pages.
Like Prince himself, the online museum is a supporter of #YesWeCode, an organization that provides opportunities for young people of color in the tech industry.
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