Just wanted to make a thread about this, to have a few second opinions. Prince used 2 give writing credits 2 others on album covers but ASCAP's database was a way of finding out. In some cases, though, it seems that Prince gave his copyrights and royalties to some people. Why he did it? I don't know, obviously a financial gift but maybe someone knows something that i don't?

Anyway...

It's notorious that Sheila E. didn't compose a note of any song of Romance 1600 save 4 Merci The Speed Of A Bad Clown In Summer (a track Prince wasn't involved in at all). Neverthless, Prince gave her the copyright & royalties of all the songs except 4 half of A Love Bizarre. He also gave her Holy Rock.

More suspicious are the cases of Carmen Electra, Goldnigga, Exodus and Milk & Honey.

Carmen Electra got numerous lyrics credits in her self titled album (http://www.princevault.co...en_Electra)
& ASCAP confirms all of them. Now for one thing it's been a known fact that Good Judy Girlfriend was composed by Prince in 89, b4 Carmen even met him, but still she gets all the credit (including composing the music). Starting with this, i've always suspected that Prince is responsible 4 ALL the lyrics she got credit 4 (including S.T. and This Is My House). Besides, i just highly doubt that Carmen ever was interested in writing songs (or singing them 4 that matter), nor that she had the skills to write such lyrics. Do we know anything about this?

Now we have Goldnigga. 2gether is listed as a Prince/Tony M. song at ASCAP and ALL the other songs are listed as being a collaborative effort (Prince, Levi, Sonny, Michael, Tony, Tommy, Morris, Kirk and even Damon Dickson, 4 chrissakes!!!). There is a very funny exemple, though: u'll notice that Call The Law is listed TWICE at ASCAP, as if it was 2 different song. The 1st one (the Money Don't Matter 2Nite original release) is a Prince/Levi composition. And then the song was copyrighted again alongside the rest of the album and this time it was composed by the whole band (this time including Rosie Gaines). This demonstrates that this album's royalties were falsely attributed at some point. So of course Prince & Levi were obviously the sole authors of Call The Law, and i'd tend to say that Tony co-wrote 2gether (hence the Prince/Mosley copyright). Then, it's very likely that the rest of the album was just 100% Prince (if not, i hardly understand why 2gether wouldn't be copyrighted as a band effort as well).

Same thing happened with Exodus (http://www.princevault.co...um:_Exodus). ASCAP credits ALL the songs to Prince, Sonny, Michael, Tommy & Morris. Now, you'll notice that Princevault credits all the songs to Prince only, save Get Wild which is attributed to Prince and Sonny. I don't know where Princevault got the in4mation but i'd tend to believe that their credits are the legitimate ones.

Last but not least, we have the partially unreleased Tamar Davis album. Tamar got various writing credits on several songs and i wouldn't have doubted them, except that someone once said here on the Org that he met her once and that they discussed the unreleased album, and that she said that she actually composed nothing at all but that Prince decided to give her credits and copyrights out of sheer generosity.

Another dubious case is Father's Song and the songs that were co-credited to Prince's father in the 80's. It's been reported by former associates that no one ever saw Prince and his dad composing anything together and that he might have wanted to allow his dad to make money out of his records. This being said, it's also possible that they DID do it without anyone witnessing it, or that Prince remembered and incorporated melodies he'd heard his dad rehearse when he was a kid, or that his dad gave him tapes or whatever.

I'd like to know if anyone here heard anything about these various recordings, since maybe NPG members, or Carmen Electra, or ingeneers adressed these issues at some point and i might have missed these interviews. I wonder if any of this has been documented and if any reason was ever given for Prince's generosity in these rare cases.

And there might also have been other similar cases that i don't know about (could it be that Prince ghostwrote a few things on GCS2000, 4 exemple?).

Peace.

Bump. Great topic of discussion.