A year after his death, in-fighting plagues Prince’s catalogue

On the first anniversary of Prince’s death (April 21), there was good news and bad news.

First, the good. Figures released this week by sales monitoring Nielsen Music showed that Prince was the best selling artist in the past 12 months.

His albums and singles shifted a total of 7.7 million units. Album sales alone were 2.3 million, which beat Adele’s album sales in the same period of 2.2 million.

On-demand streams totalled nearly 97.6 million, of which nearly 37 million were on-demand audio. 61 million came from on-demand video.

These figures explain the current in-fighting over his recorded music catalogue.

It has been estimated, with thousands of unreleased tracks factored in, to be worth US$500 million. The figure includes future royalties, retail sales and commercial rights. 

This week, an EP of six unreleased tracks, Deliverance, set to hit streaming today, has been abandoned for the time being after the estate got a Federal court order.

The six tracks, recorded between 2006 and 2008, were cleaned up by his former sound engineer, George Ian Boxill. It was released through a Washington state-based independent Rogue Music Alliance.

Boxill is being sued by the estate over who owns the rights to the tracks. He claims he co-wrote and co-produced the tracks. 

While it was pulled from streaming, Rogue Music is still selling the title track – a bluesy gospel groove number – as a single, as it was released before the court order.

Boxill said, “Prince once told me that he would go to bed every night thinking of ways to bypass major labels and get his music directly to the public.

“When considering how to release this important work, we decided to go independent because that’s what Prince would have wanted.”

In the meantime, the $30 million licensing deal struck in February by the estate with Universal Music Group has run into problems. It could mean that the post-1995 catalogue could be on the market again. 

Universal is happy with the publishing (administration) and merchandising deals struck at the same time. 

But it is claiming allegations of “fraudulent misrepresentation’ by the estate. 

Billboard reported that according to UMG, the agreement was that it would get the licensing rights to Prince’s post-1995 catalogue globally, and some “key titles” from the Warner catalogue (recorded 1978—1995) for the United States. 

But UMG claims that it was told that Prince’s deal with Warner expired in June 2018. But it transpires that it could actually be 2021. The two men who negotiated the deals, L. Londell McMillan and Charles Koppelman, are no longer advisers to the estate.

On April 17 when Troy Carter took over as the entertainment adviser, he said the estate was "assessing all rights relating to Prince’s recorded music".

Coming in June through Warner Bros, with whom Prince re-signed in 2014, are two albums of new music found in his vault alongside a remastered copy of his hit album Purple Rain.