Purple Rain and Prince as Entrepreneur

Last night, I had the privilege to attend Opening Night of the world premiere of the Broadway Bound musical, “Purple Rain” at the Historic State Theatre in Minneapolis. You can see from the photo that I even “glammed up” my outfit a bit for the premiere and post-show party at First Avenue! I guess being the current Board Chair of Hennepin Arts made me want to fully embrace the opportunity!

A little background. Frequent readers of entreVIEW all know I am a musical theatre enthusiast. I’ve posted about musicals more than a dozen times over the year…even including this post back in 2012 about a musical that I have written. You may not know that I am also a huge Prince enthusiast!  Of course, as someone who grew up in the Twin Cities and witnessed the rise of the Purple One to superstardom, I would have been in the minority if I hadn’t been. The original “Purple Rain” movie was an iconic moment. I saw it opening night (and another time or two) and the album (yes, it was vinyl) and cassette (what else would one have listened to in your car?) were pretty much on repeat throughout the second half of 1984.

Since I’m not a theatre critic, I’m not intending to write a review of the musical, where two of my worlds collide. The iconic Prince music from the movie, plus about 15 other songs written by him (some made famous by others) wrapped around some smart updating to the original story from the movie made for a thoroughly enjoyable 2 hours and 40 minutes. I understand this is almost 45 minutes less than the first preview performance about three weeks ago, as the creators have worked to tighten and trim the narrative.

As I was thinking about this post over the last few days, I knew it would be easy to link Prince to entrepreneurship because he was such a successful entrepreneur. A quick google search made me realize that so much has been written about the success of Prince not just as a musician, but also as an entrepreneur, that I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Much of this content came out around the time of his untimely passing in 2016. If you’re interested in some of the more interesting articles I found, check out:

• This article about six things that made Prince the “perfect entrepreneur,” including that he was a feminist—something that may not have been obvious from his external person and the explicit content of much of his music.
• Buy Black Main Street wrote about his legacy of artist empowerment, advocacy, and influence on Musical Entrepreneurship.
• An Inc. article regarding 5 powerful business lessons to be learned from Prince.
• This Startup Biz article regarding what every startup founder can learn from Prince.
• And, this later article regarding 10 reasons why Prince is the Ultimate Entrepreneur.