Hi,

I remember that back in the day, for every 15 songs you got in a year which were officially released, you got another 15 as "outtakes" on boots. Usually in pretty crappy quality (which improved over the years).

Now, over the last years, this seems to have stopped. Is Prince taking more care nowaday, or is he just producing less music? I heard that he actually gave away cassettes of new music in the 80s to friends - maybe he has no friends no more???

What is your take on that?

from unreleased songs I've heard about 1 in 10 are worth ever listening to again...they were unreleased for a reason

Krid said:

A little from column A, a little from column B most likely. Although since the mid-90s Prince is running a tighter ship, post-1996 leaks are minimal compared to before.

peppeken said:

all the full fledged studio songs that were not released are
worth listening to imo.

at least half of those are as treasured and love by me as the
ones that ended up on his official albums.

it's the alternate takes, snippets, distorted mixes etc that
are kind of pointless unless you're a completist.

but the unreleased completed songs are priceless alongside me
i'm sure 90% of the people on this site would gladly trade in
a paycheck for a good box set containing the best 50 or 60.

oh, and as far as outtakes popping up in the underground cirquit,
i think he's just gotten more carefull with his material since he
found out exactly how much of it was circulating and how people
are trading it and making money off it.

but from various snippets i've heard of stuff that's not even in
the underground cirquit, there are hints that some collectors own
stuff that's never been released on bootlegs before, neither on
the whole "work" series or "testament".

who knows when we'll see those. my guess is they will leak over
time but it won't be anything near the flood of outtakes we got
since the late 80's.

a few "post 1996" outtakes that surprised me were "teacher teacher"
and "it's a wonderful day" since those had, to my knowledge, not
been circulating before the remastered Dream Factory release on
some bootleg label or other.

it's stuff like that which makes me assume there are more outtakes
out there in the hands of collectors that are not willing to let
them go yet.

cosmic day, anyone?

I got the impression he doesn't produce as much as pre-1996

Krid said:

It's probably a bit of both, but my impression is that it's mostly down to
Prince plugging the leaks. He's certainly still making loads of music that
we never hear or hear about. Though whether he's producing music in
quite the quantity he used to is virtually impossible to gage.