Prince Estate Signs Deal With Sony Music to Re-Release 35 Catalog Albums

On the shows that are circulating, a lot of the covers are short. Most disappointing — to me at least — is that the cover of Dylan’s “To Make You Feel My Love” does not have Prince on vocals.

 

The tickets were probably a couple hundred at least. Those Prince shows weren’t cheap!

 

Tickets were a flat $25! No Ticketbastard fees!

 

For real? Wow. I’m used to Prince shows being pretty expensive.

 

I saw Prince five times - twice on the Emancipation tour (including New Year's Eve 1999), once on the first Hit & Run tour, and twice on the Musicology tour - and none of the shows were ever over $75 per ticket, even after service fees.

Not sure about that, unless it was a fan club presale. The deluxe edition comes with a replica ticket stub from the tour, and it clearly has the Ticketmaster logo.

Edit: BTW, this ticket has the price tag of $199.50. But it's also third row. Make of that what you will:

Edit: Here's one more for $75 (with the Ticketmaster logo still attached):

 

For his 21 night stint at 02 in London the tickets were £31.21 a pop. ($42 in todays money). Biggest bargain for an arena show I've ever come across. Great show too.

 

These ticket prices are surprising. I remember hearing about how his tours with 3rdEyeGirl were expensive. Glad I’m wrong!

 

My ticket for the show with 3rdEyeGirl at The Louisville Palace was $175, it was a 5th row aisle seat on the side. Those in the center section were $275.

 

Those are different shows. The Forum run. Was different, shows were announced weirdly, day of sometimes and tickets would go on sale that day. It was fun. Went to three shows. Have the tickets somewhere.

 

That's STRANGE. Maybe they'll consider doing a 2 CD/Bluray of just the concert (or even a Madison Square Garden show from the same tour would do).

 

The 3EG show prices were... eccentric.

I paid ten pounds to get into a two and a half show one week, and seventy pounds for a one and a half hour show the next week!

 

My first: August 17, 1986 - Rotterdam
ticket: €14,70 (calculated to euro)

My last: May 25, 2014 - Amsterdam
ticket: €100

 

Prince's Sister on Honoring Her Brother's Vault of Unreleased Music

 

So The Truth is coming June 12 and W2A June 30? Is that it so far? Maybe there will be more when The Truth gets a wide release.

 

The Truth is June 12th (RSD) and Welcome 2 America is actually July 30th, not June... with the Diamonds And Pearls Super Deluxe supposedly following near the end of the year. Hopefully the Crystal Ball reissue will come in between W2A and Diamonds SDE... though nothing confirmed yet.

 

My final Prince show was Baltimore 2015. I think they did have some relatively expensive tickets, but I'm pretty sure I paid like $25/ticket!

 

Good information. Thanks for the link to this interview with Tyka. Wish she would have mentioned the possibility of more Concerts being released on BluRay, CD and Streaming though.

 

I wish Tyka well, but I do have a hard time believing that she spent most of her life essentially not seeing what all the fuss was about her brother... she says she didn't think he was up there with the likes of MJ and Madonna, and was surprised at all the fuss around him... until about four years before his death? That I find hard to believe...

 

she released an album herself in the 80's, she must have noticed the difference in popularity and or sales numbers between "Royal Blue" (get it?) and any Prince album in the 80's...

 

I'm pretty sure this is a lie

For Tyka, it’s an opportunity to fulfil her brother’s wishes, which he shared with her three years before his passing: “I won’t get off this planet until he gets every single solitary thing he worked so hard for and preserved for all of the world to hear.”

I doubt he wanted the world to hear everything.

Still, she's riding the gravy train so she can say what she likes - especially with the Sony fleecing machine currently concocting new ways to fleece the fans.

Prince always wanted to get paid, but not like this

 

Rumor has it that Tyka just had surgery to have here hands replaced with ladles to assist her ride on the Prince Gravy Train. In all seriousness, I do not personally know Tyka, so will not question her motives. As long as we are getting access to buy some of Prince’s Better Vault Songs and hopefully more Concerts, then “I am happy(hope your happy too)” to quote another Music Icon we lost also in 2016.

 

I doubt that, too.

What was she supposed to do then? Should nobody have taken over the estate? Should the government have auctioned the properties, the vaults, the clothes, the furniture, the musical instruments? Let's recall that Prince had no last will and testament.

For that matter, what is Sony supposed to do? Should they ignore the dwindling sales figures for physical media? Should they not incentivize products to sell to certain sets and sub-sets of people and their respective demographics? Sony is making informed business decisions in a seller's market that is rife with uncertainly. If that wasn't the case, then other artist's, living or dead, would not be espousing similar business models for physical releases.

Prince was a capitalist. Make no mistake. He often wrestled with the ways and means of making a buck, but let's not assume what Prince would have done with the windfall of a dead artist's estate. We might also keep in mind that running an estate isn't merely a matter of forking over music to a record company and having it released. The aforementioned stroke of luck that Tyka & heirs inherited upon Prince's passing, came with a bill that only a stable of lawyers, advisors, music experts, and relators could untangle. Now you have staff to pay, taxes to vent, boardroom meetings and a pandemic to traverse. After that...?

Then comes the music.

Coincidently, or perhaps ironically..."Welcome 2 America"

 

If only they'd have had 5 years of another record label managing vault material well at both decent value and sales figures as a guide....

 

I don't know the answer to this, but it's ridiculous to think that one competitor would follow the example of another. Each record company has their own number-crunchers, their own bottom-line. They formulate a plan based on their investment, and in the case of Sony, they paid a lot more than WB did. WB only put out what they paid Prince: a sum for a set-amount of new albums, and the soundtrack albums became a freebie. Sony, on the other hand, bought the rights to almost an entire catalog, and had to sit on it a few years before it matured in their favor.

The issue is a price hike. I know. I can do the math. I can feel the hit. I don't like it, but from my vantage I can see Sony's logic, and I'll pay the extra tax if it means that unreleased Prince music keeps coming. We can opt for a boycott, but do we really want to waste our ears by letting our wallets do the hearing? Maybe so. I put in my pre-order.

 

It is ridiculous to think charging £120 additional for a single blu-ray, is in any way reasonable, unavoidable or that it couldn't have be done any other way. I'm simply pointing out that it wasn't like they had no option on this and it wasn't like there weren't precedents etc. that they could have followed. The actual unreleased album itself is reasonably priced, it's the live show that isn't - at least outside of the US. In fact it's the largest premium I can recall seeing for a single item. I've opted to import it at a much lower cost - still pricey, but far more reasonable than 150-160 (that's a USD equivalent of $205-217 at UK retail - so more than double the cost in the US, what possible justification could there be for that, especially considering these will most likely be pressed in Europe, apart from pure profit gauging?) The reason I'm angry about it is because I think it will turn a lot off people of and potentially put future releases in jepordy.