News broke a couple of days ago that Prince died at 57 in his home. I have always liked Prince’s music and had massive respect for his incredible musical talent. I heard when I was a teenager that he played over 50 instruments!?!
However the biggest influence Prince had on me, really had nothing to do with music but did alter the path of just about my entire life.
It was the end of 1995 and I would reading many different books like Think and Grow Rich, and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. After reading these books and getting all motivated to be a success etc, I came up with the name Jaijaz for my future company. It was going to be my record label and it was going to be different. You see at the time, Prince, Madonna and George Michael were all having high profile legal battles with their record labels. Prince was possibly the biggest dispute though, as he even went so far as to say change his name to a symbol as a statement that he didn’t feel he even owned his identity, that the labels owned everything.
So the concept of Jaijaz was born. It would be like the “5th member of the band”. Be a partner not an overload. With my understanding systems and processes in those days learned from my time at McDonalds and Subway, I would build a turnkey reusable system that would enable Jaijaz to help any musician market themselves, sell their music and build and reach their fan base, without selling their identity to a record label.
It was this ideal that would ultimately be the basis of what Jaijaz business would become, but not for musicians so much but small businesses. While ultimately I didn’t get Jaijaz to succeed, the work I did with Ora definitely felt like a realisation of much of that vision that was inspired by Prince’s fight for control of his music.