Given that you've offered literally no reasoning behind your feelings, maybe you shouldn't present/ act on them as assertions?

Why destroy his lifes work? If he himself had strong feelings about this and made it known that he wanted his work destroyed in the event of his death then fair enough. It would break my heart, but I would accept it if that were his wishes. But if he never felt strong enough to put something in place for when he died, then it seems needlessly destructive and almost disrespectful to destroy his lifes work.

Prince put his unreleased music in a "vault" so clearly he never wanted it destroyed, otherwise he would have just thrown it out. Some of his music he first recorded and stored away before he dug it out and worked on it again years later.

Why destroy music? Music IS creation. Some of his work may have never been "finished", that doesn't mean that there is no worth in hearing it.

I may be naive but I can imagine we are all in for a big, pleasant surprise after all.

I can imagine Prince suspecting (or knowing) he won't live long and deliberately holding back releases as he knew the way he would present them himself would not please most of us, especially on this site.

I mean he's been following or at least regularly checking out the org, he was obviously aware that we had quite legitimate concerns about him editing, remixing or in any way twinkering with his own back catalog. Most of us wouldn't want him to change his old songs and most certainly no-one wanted him to "touch up" or "rethink" any of his unreleased gems.

A lot of us also expressed our concerns regarding how he himself would put together new releases - would the artwork be professional enough? Would the mastering be good enough? etc - as his independent releases often proved these things shouldn't be left up to him alone.

So I can imagine him thinking: "okay, I wouldn't be able to please you guys anyway, so let's just wait until I'm gone and someone else will take care of all this stuff professionally".

Yes, I can still dream.

MattyJam said:

Why destroy his lifes work? If he himself had strong feelings about this and made it known that he wanted his work destroyed in the event of his death then fair enough. It would break my heart, but I would accept it if that were his wishes. But if he never felt strong enough to put something in place for when he died, then it seems needlessly destructive and almost disrespectful to destroy his lifes work.

Kafka also asked for his work to be destroyed and thank god it didn't happen.

But I'm not sure if he put his request in an official document.

OperatingThetan said:

The recently published Rolling Stone interview from 2014 has specific and clear ideas from Prince about how the vault releases should be handled if he was no longer communicating in 'real time.' Hopefully, his wishes and suggestions will be followed.

Yup. It's pretty clear from that interview that he wanted the vault material released. Some albums had already been sequensed, the rest had been grouped according to time periods.

Pentacle said:

MattyJam said:

Why destroy his lifes work? If he himself had strong feelings about this and made it known that he wanted his work destroyed in the event of his death then fair enough. It would break my heart, but I would accept it if that were his wishes. But if he never felt strong enough to put something in place for when he died, then it seems needlessly destructive and almost disrespectful to destroy his lifes work.

Kafka also asked for his work to be destroyed and thank god it didn't happen.

But I'm not sure if he put his request in an official document.

Kafka ordered his best friend Max Brodt to destroy his unpublished work after his death but he didn´t listen.

Kafka was the first artist that came to my mind as well. I don´t know how to feel about this. On the one hand we should respect the artist´s wish, on the other hand preserving the art is probably just as important when we look at the bigger picture and the effect of preserving the art in question. In Kafka´s case, preserving the art was , in my opinion, the better decision for various reasons, and I think the same goes for Prince´s unreleased material.

OperatingThetan said:

The recently published Rolling Stone interview from 2014 has specific and clear ideas from Prince about how the vault releases should be handled if he was no longer communicating in 'real time.' Hopefully, his wishes and suggestions will be followed.

Is that alluding to a time when he's no longer with us?

2olskool4u said:

I think he's given us enough already, I just don't want to see someone making millions churning all this stuff out. I just hope his will is water-tight and whatever he wanted, really happens. Maybe some free music and definitely some videos/movies, but I have a feeling everything may get ugly soon, Theres something I dont trust about his 'family', hope I'm wrong

If the issue is not wanting someone to profit from it, there's a simple solution: just release the music online for free. There is absolutely no reason to be destroying his work. It'd be like someone destroying all of van Gogh's paintings when he died.

In rencent interviews he always responded to the vault music as "someone will release it, but I doubt it will be me." So he was not adverse to it coming out.

I would like a DVD of the piano and mic tour for those of us unfortunate ones who didn't get a chance to see it. A compliation of all his videos would be nice as well.

I also would like some of the unreleased stuff, I know a lot of it is already out there but I don't have it all and would like it.