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Artist News Releases
23 more Prince albums now available to stream following Sony deal
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 17 August 2018
Following the recent deal between the Prince estate and Sony Music, which followed the disastrous deal between the Prince estate and Universal Music, 23 Prince albums have just gone online. Some are available via legitimate digital channels for the first time.
The Prince estate, of course, originally did three deals with Universal Music covering the late musician’s recordings, songs and merchandise. But the recordings deal fell apart because of confusion over what albums and singles the arrangement actually covered, Prince having entered into a new deal with his original label Warner Music two years before his death.
With Universal’s recordings deal abandoned, the estate announced a new partnership with Sony Music in June this year. This is the first project under that deal, with 23 catalogue titles going live on the digital platforms alongside a new ‘Prince Anthology: 1995-2010’ collection.
All the releases being put out by Sony’s Legacy Recordings come from between those dates, what the major had decided was “a crucial epoch in Prince history”. It adds: “Many of these albums, long sought-after by fans and collectors, are available for the first time for streaming and download, adding more than 300 essential Prince songs to the artist’s online in-print catalogue”. Lovely stuff.
“For Prince, 1995-2010 was an unprecedented period of sustained and prolific creativity”, the official blurb goes on. “Releasing fresh recordings at a rapid-fire pace through a variety of distribution strategies, including his own online NPG Music Club, Prince was making some of the most provocative, experimental and soulful music of his career”.
It then notes that, “freed from major label demands and expectations, Prince was able to write, record and release his own music on his own terms”. Though Sony would surely like to remind you that it was the demands and expectations of the bastards at Warner Music that Prince managed to free himself from in the mid-1990s. Sony Music was too busy having high profile run ins with George Michael in the 1990s to be causing any bother to Prince.
The newly available to stream records are as follows:
The Gold Experience (1995)
Chaos and Disorder (1996)
Emancipation (1996)
Crystal Ball (1998)
The Truth (1998)
Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic (1999)
Rave In2 The Joy Fantastic (2001)
The Rainbow Children (2001)
One Nite Alone… (2002)
One Nite Alone…Live! (2002)
One Nite Alone… Live – The Aftershow (2002)
Xpectation (2003)
N.E.W.S. (2003)
C-Note (2004)
Musicology (2004)
The Chocolate Invasion (Trax from the NPG Music Club: Volume 1) (2004)
The Slaughterhouse (Trax from the NPG Music Club: Volume 2) (2004)
3121 (2006)
Planet Earth (2007)
Indigo Nights (2008)
LOtUSFLOW3R (2009)
MPLSoUND (2009)
20Ten (2010)
