In my book, Prince remains a marketing genius on par with Steve Jobs, James Cameron, or Seth Godin. The number of serious news and pop media sites that took the bait today and belittled him for saying things like “The internet’s completely over” in this exclusive UK Mirror interview was mind-boggling. It was a bit reminiscent of when he changed his name to , and the media took it as a sign of insanity rather than the perfectly rational symbolic protest against an oppressive contract with Warner that it was. Oh. And let’s just pause for a moment and realize that we’re still talking about that little trick almost twenty years later! Which is – aside from his obvious musical talent – probably Prince’s greatest gift: an understanding of the social object . In my opinion the only really crazy things that Prince has said or done would be partnering with Walmart for the exclusive release of his triple-album “Lotusflow3r”, or suing 18 month old babies for dancing to his music . I personally was a fan of prince beginning with “Dirty Mind” (amazingly still available on the Internet), and kind of drifted away around the time of Raspberry Beret. I honestly haven’t listened to a single release by him since about 1993. Which doesn’t mean I don’t still admire him, his legendary solo in this video (also below) of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” will be with me forever, and although I may never buy all of his ten platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles, I’m revisiting his last fifteen years of music as I type this. Mostly because of that silly UK Mirror ploy. And I’ll probably like something. And probably buy it. On the Internet. Which is hilarious, because I’m one of the few people I know that agrees 100% with Prince. The Internet IS completely over in the same way that MTV was over years ago. Oh, and if you doubt the success of his little marketing stunt, we checked Google’s Insights for Search and terms related to Prince were either classified as “breakout” or up 500% this week (see below). Although that will certainly mean a lot of free downloads, it’s also certain to convert into a lot of sales that would never have occurred otherwise.

This clip of Kevin Smith making fun of Prince’s alleged eccentrities was making the rounds today, but highlights the fact that maybe Silent Bob should’ve stayed that way. Does anyone really believe the “camel at 3am” story? Transcript here if you don’t feel like watching the Not So Silent Bob playing with his nose every 90 seconds or so.

One of the things that made the While My Guitar Gently Weeps video so pervasively shared was one simple thing that Prince did at the very end of the solo…