With the upcoming Prince 4ever album being announced, I feel like Prince's commerical success during the 80's is overshadowing his true legacy. The brilliance or his entire catalogue cannot be understated, yet money talks and those who stand to profit from Prince's legacy are missing a golden opportunity to open Prince's vast catalogue to the masses. After the the early 90's, Prince released so many masterpeices that I listen to every week even today. I understand the average fan will buy an album with "Kiss" on it, but with clever marketing, they could sell Prince as the ultimate misunderstood genius by shedding light on his more recent releases. We all know he didn't play "the game" when it came to releasing new albums. Now is the chance to sell that story. Sell Prince as someone who lost popularity in the 90's due to his eccentricty and now we all love him for it and want to listen to everything. Start promoting Prince as the king of hidden gems. He was someone who didn't want to be popular after his peak. Paint Prince as the modern day Mozart and stir up a yearning to go through his entire catalogue and search for masterpieces to appreciate. With careful planning, there is long-term money to be made with this type of strategy, whereas it might be counterintuitive to play it safe with his chart success in the 80's and miss out on this opportunity to influence public opinion. Those in charge have a golden opportunity to create a legacy for Prince that transcends that of any other artist of the past 100 years due to his mysteriousness and seemingly constant obsession for recording thousands of unreleased songs.

[Edited 10/25/16 6:07am]

Prince is a musician's musician.

If you want to educate the masses, good luck with that.
As Leonard Cohen wrote in "Hallelujah" :
"But you don't really care for music, do you?"

But I do agree there's a niche market,
and that a proper story-telling is yet to be seen.
The man's life is a fantastic material : child prodigy, paranoia, independence, showmanship, etc.

As for the "artist of the century", keep in mind that as fans, our view is biaised in big ways.
Non-stop recording doesn't really qualify as being a genius.
Sure he recorded a lot of songs, but the vast majority is either him working on an idea,
or stretching his musical muscles, or developing an old gimmick.
Most of the times the songs are good because the exist in the Prince realm.
Take them out, they become so obscure they wouldn't make much sense to the casual listener.

I wouldn't go as far as some claiming 80% of The Vault is "crap",
but it's not SOTT material either, for the most part.

[Edited 10/25/16 6:26am]

"4ever" is a Warner Brothers release, they don't have access to much of his post 90's stuff.

GoldStandard said:

Prince is a musician's musician.

If you want to educate the masses, good luck with that.
As Leonard Cohen ...

I consider myself one of the uneducated masses...(tho lc was part if my collection back in the sixties). Although I had ten years of instruction on two instruments, I'll never be able to appreciate the musicianship. I just don't have the ear. For me music is an emotional experience.

My first experience with pop music dates to the late fifties and sixties...In the seventies I got rid of all my pop records, etc and moved on to classical..then in the eighties, I went through a period of personal crisis and spent a lot of nights listening to mtv and Prince was one of my favorite performers.. Then as life returned to normal, I moved on and music became less important in my life...but over the years, I would always watch the award shows, etc. and I was pleased to see Prince reemerge in the 2000's..but that was as far as my interest went. Then a couple of years ago, I saw a skater perform to "a question of u" and I said to friends that I never knew that Prince made music like that and I wished that there was some way to locate that music but I didn't know how to find it.

After Prince died, I had to make a twelve hour drive and decided to try the Prince channel on XM...I expected to listen for maybe a half hour or so and I ended up listening to it for the entire trip and only heard several songs played more than once...I was totally amazed by what I heard..when I got home, I goggled him and started reading reviews of his music, looking at performances, and started reading this site...all this has led me to sign up for a TIDAL subscription. I started out listening to his albums in the chronological order of release..until I got to the ninties, which I didn't like so well. Then I switched to reverse chronological order. And, when I would read people on here, raving about some of the music from the ninties, I would listen to it and now I've listen to all the albums and developed an appreciation for all of it.

What has been amazing about my experience is that as I played the music, some of my friends would ask what I was playing and I would say Prince, they would all say that they had no idea that he made music like that...they just thought he sang about explicit sex and wore assless pants..and now, they have even bought albums..and, yes, one friend just bought pr but that is more than she had before. I introduced another friend to some of his after concert albums and she came back to me and asked me to download sott for her..she now has five of his albums on her MP3 player...and as we started to share our Prince experience, we have been amazed to find out that there is a whole group of our the generation (early boomers)who like prince's music..recently I had lunch with the friend and was absolutely shocked to find that she had made a day long drive to visit Paisley Park this summer. I had no idea! The last time we had listened to music was the summer we cruised around listening to "Satisfaction". That is how old we are!

I know this is a really long post but I wanted to share it because I think there is an untapped audience for a lot of his music..some of us aren't musical connoisseurs but we can appreciate melody and rhythm and lots of Prince's music has that and has a very accessible sound...I understand that it would involve some commercialization of his music but I think it could be done with respect. In a number of interviews, he said that his songs were his children. This is his legacy to the world..he put them out there for people to hear.

JMHO