Purple Reign: Prince’s Impact on Music and Brands

Purple Reign: Prince’s Impact on Music and Brands

The sudden death of pop music icon Prince at age 57 on Thursday reverberated around the world — not least of all in the music and entertainment industry, with which he had a love/hate relationship.

His passing not only draped the planet in purple (from Delta flights to violet lights), it prompted MTV to interrupt its programming and return to the “M” in its name and air a video — kicking off with 1991’s “Cream” followed by other actual music videos — coincidentally, just as its ad sales executives were announcing a return to music programming at Viacom’s ad sales upfront event in New York.

MTV president Sean Atkins hailed a return to its music roots withWonderland, the cable network’s first music series in nearly two decades, along with a new music competition series from Mark Burnett and a reboot of MTV Unplugged, the iconic series known for acoustic performances by Nirvana and others back in the 1980s.

“We’re on a mission to reignite MTV with everything that makes it one of the world’s most iconic brands  – its soul of music, its love of pop culture, and its unexpected, groundbreaking creative,” Atkins stated in a press release.  “What we share today is just the beginning, but it’s a strong first step in the journey and shows how aggressively we are moving to energize the extraordinary promise of this great brand.”

Prince, although an early fan of selling music online and a supporter of teaching kids computer coding skills via Yes We Code, fought against how record labels treated artists and what the music industry became with the advent of digital streaming and online ticket sales.

He famously changed his name to a symbol (talk about personal branding) to protest his label, Warner Bros., and last year pulled his music catalog from the web, boycotting the majority of streaming services except for Jay Z’s Tidal, where he only offered one song.

The scarcity of his music online, except for some performance videos,drove sales of his music on Thursday: seven of his songs were on the US iTunes top 100 by midnight and seven of his albums occupied the top 10 albums chart.

Other brands, meanwhile, rushed to make their logos purple and made some social missteps, even if their intentions were good — 3M (with its purple logo and teardrop) and Cheerios (with a cheerio dotting the ‘I’ in “Rest in Peace”) parent General Mills are based in Prince’s hometownof Minneapolis.

His hometown tributes included this classy shout-out:

The New Yorker turned around its pitch-perfect tribute cover in a heartbeat:

Another brand that got it right: Google, which quickly created a subtle Google Doodle to commemorate the artist.

A purple rain fell over its homepage at Google.com while a purple version of its logo linked to tributes to Prince, before being replaced at midnight by its Earth Day tribute.