Greg Brown

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Prince estate signs deal for back catalogue and 35 unreleased albums

Jun 28, 2018

Prince fans should brace themselves for a massive amount of new music to come their way in the near future. Rolling Stone reported that the musician’s estate has signed a deal with Sony/Legacy for distribution rights to 35 unreleased Prince albums. In addition to the previously unheard music, the label will make available “19 Prince albums originally issued between 1995 and 2010. These include The Gold Experience, Emancipation, Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic, The Rainbow Children, Musicology, and Planet Earth.” There has been no time table set for the reissues or unreleased albums.

The new deal also gives Sony/Legacy the rights to the cream of Prince’s catalogue — his classic albums released between 1978 and 1996, along with any and all of his B-sides, non-LP tracks, remixes, live recordings, and videos.

On September 21st, the Prince estate, in partnership with Warner Bros. Records, will release the first full posthumous Prince album, titled Piano & A Microphone 1983. The set will see official release as nine track, 35-minute album featuring the contents of a previously unreleased 1983 home studio cassette recording of Prince at his piano captured at his Kiowa Trail home studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota by engineer Don Batts.

At a press conference back in 2000, Prince — who was always leery of any type of connection he had with his record label — described what he saw as a major problem with traditional musical conglomerates: “The price of CD’s have skyrocketed, while the quality of music has plummeted — and as long as middle-men create the means by which the consumer consumes, this will never change. The problem’s not a complex one, and the solution is simple: let the baker make the bread. I am a musician — I make music. The moment someone defines music as ‘content,’ then we got a problem.”

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