In 1993, Prince was fed up with his label, Warner Bros, with whom he had signed a $100 million deal less than a year before. They wanted him to release fewer CDs so he wouldn’t flood the market. The artist responded by accusing Warner of stifling his creativity but he couldn’t get out of his contract so he decided to change his name to an unpronounceable combination of the symbols for male (♂) and female (♀). In order for the media to use the symbol, his record label had to mail out thousands of floppy disks with a custom font.

Officially, the singer explained his new designation in a press statement by saying:

It is an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It’s all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency.

What about introductions?
As he told an interviewer in 1995,

I get by. I don’t need a name as such, really.

Journalists started to call him “the artist formerly known as Prince,” but in 2000 he went back to Prince when his Warner contract expired. Between 1993–2000 sales of his new music slowed down significantly, but he still managed to get his point across.

A brand is a brand!

P.S.: Our movie about names is on its final stage of postproduction. Help this movie to see the world. Contribute to the crowdfunding action! http://bit.ly/It5Zmv