Spring Break

Prince doesn't know the future of M3. "It's his company now," he says of LeBeau. "The truth of the matter is that it's out of my hands." His new project, which he hopes to launch in 2008, is being developed with the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts and the producers of the Sonar music festival in Barcelona, Spain. "It will be a version of Sonar in Miami," Prince says.

Improbably Prince still declines to give props to Winter Music Conference for establishing South Beach's multimillion-dollar dance bonanza, claiming that spring breakers and European tourists deserve equal credit for its success. But he acknowledges an industry perception that Winter Music Conference simply outmatched M3.

"Winter Music Conference is happening, and M3 is not, so I guess you could look at it that way," Prince says. "But M3 really brought something new, exciting, and different. It brought down a whole group of people for that week. That's going to be notably absent this year."