thedawn.com

1996/7

TheDawn.com was launched on Valentine’s Day 1996, and is Prince’s first website. It launched with the eight-page wedding program, titled Coincidence or fate? to mark the marriage of Prince and Mayte that same day.

The domain is the name of the triple album (The Dawn) Prince was working on at the time in 1994, proclaiming his creative rebirth, however this that project was split to two individual albums, The Gold Experience and Come with the remaining tracks ending up on the configuration for Crystal Ball. The Dawn was also the title of an even earlier project, a stage musical Prince was putting together in 1986 but evolved into the movie Graffiti Bridge.

TheDawn.com was later expanded to feature a chat room and offered sound and video samples of Prince’s current and archive songs and footage. All music content was streamed; no downloadable material was issued from this website. TheDawn.com additionally sold merchandise through what became one of the internet’s earliest online stores. Called Galleria, it sold jewellery and apparel, and whilst it also sold CDs both by Prince and other artists all were already available and previously released.

The website later took on the function as the platform for Prince to state his side in running the commentary to his embittered dispute with Warner Brothers, with a page titled ‘Message From The Artist’. The dispute reached its height thought the span of this website’s existence. TheDawn.com was live at the time of the release of Emancipation, Prince’s first album released under a mainstream record label that was not Warner. TheDawn.com remained Prince’s main website until May 1997 when replaced by love4oneanother.com.

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