Just to follow on from a point I made on another thread. The PURPLE community has always been split on seeing bootleggers as either 'theives in the temple' or a great source to fill their collections.

I wonder now with the lack of product or anything worthwhile from the estate if we all see bootleggers as a great potential link between them & us?

I would actually argue that the estate should form [legals permitting?] some form of partnership agreements with the peeps at say Sabotage, Eye etc.

I for one now see them as vital. The portfolio of live / soundboard recordings from main shows & aftershows will never be released in vast quantities from the estate - it's bloody impossible!.

Likewise the quality of ready made studio out-take compilations, live studio jams & rehearsals are all done, beutifully packaged & include some great liner notes!

Bootleggers already 100% know what the community want & have supplied the product to satisfy - the horse bolted years ago..the estate may as well try to rein it in & make it work for all parties?!

Thoughts?

It'd be nice if the Estate would reach out to the Org for some collaboration.

No

Moinnesota law is whack. They never should have moved the tapes out of Paisley. Fam gave away all their leverage, when they allowed nonsense 'salvation and restoration'. Tapes are digitized which means the powers-that-be have all they really need. Stems floating around the industry. Future releases probably (since all they have are copycat ideas) will look like MJ outtakes where he's featured on Drake tracks and Justin Timberlake and a bunch of other stuff that's not representative of who he is. Bootleggers will get hunted down and sued to hell and back for releasing real Prince tracks. Our best hope is probably that the industry leaks like crazy, which means eventually this stuff will probably just start showing up on the web. I heard a pop song the other day somewhere, that sounded like Prince circa 1983 or so, but with digital production. Immediately I figured they used outtakes as a guide track. It was supposed to be different though. It was supposed to be virtually everything released immediately in a NPG Music Club type of format upon his passing. He wasn't interested in setting it up ("that will take too long"), and I don't know what happened with Tidal, but the plan was for the fans to get the music like a Wizard of Oz style muchkin celebration.

sulls said:

It'd be nice if the Estate would reach out to the Org for some collaboration.

I entirely agree, and have advocated for a while that the Estate would be well-advised to reach out to the community to just talk with the fans and that there are some of us who have an intimate knowledge of Prince's catalogue that could help making sensible choices when it comes to curating the archives.

.

Now as for Purpleized3121's suggestion I fail to understand the reasoning behind it. What can bootleggers possibly do for the Estate that the Estate needs? Which bootleggers specifically? And why bootleggers of all people? How could they possibly be of use when it comes to graphic design or liner notes of all things?

.

It has to be kept in mind that bootleggers do not really curate, particularly those who do it for profit. Usually they just put out whatever they can put their hands on and we often end-up with messy tracklists, and that's OK because that's what bootleggers do, but that's not what we should expect from the Estate.

So, the bootleggers would come forward and out themselves as criminals, after which the Estate will reward them for their criminality by partnering with them? Why should either side trust the other?

funksterr said:

Moinnesota law is whack. They never should have moved the tapes out of Paisley. Fam gave away all their leverage, when they allowed nonsense 'salvation and restoration'. Tapes are digitized which means the powers-that-be have all they really need. Stems floating around the industry. Future releases probably (since all they have are copycat ideas) will look like MJ outtakes where he's featured on Drake tracks and Justin Timberlake and a bunch of other stuff that's not representative of who he is. Bootleggers will get hunted down and sued to hell and back for releasing real Prince tracks. Our best hope is probably that the industry leaks like crazy, which means eventually this stuff will probably just start showing up on the web. I heard a pop song the other day somewhere, that sounded like Prince circa 1983 or so, but with digital production. Immediately I figured they used outtakes as a guide track. It was supposed to be different though. It was supposed to be virtually everything released immediately in a NPG Music Club type of format upon his passing. He wasn't interested in setting it up ("that will take too long"), and I don't know what happened with Tidal, but the plan was for the fans to get the music like a Wizard of Oz style muchkin celebration.

None of this will happen.

McD said:

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but haven’t the posthumous releases so far actually been from bootlegs, not the vault? Moonbeam Levels and the extra disc on Purple Rain sounded like bootlegs, not vault tracks, to me. In some cases blatantly so. And we all own boots that sound better than Piano and a Microphone ‘83, whatever the source of that was.

.

They weren't sourced from bootlegs, but you're right in noticing that none of the posthumus releases sound as clean and tight as genuine master tapes would. PRD outtakes and Moonbeam Levels were sourced from cassette copies, P&AM83 was taped on a cassette, and NC2U was at least partially sourced from cassette too.

And it's a disgrace that 3 years after his death, this is all we got so far.
.

[Edited 3/31/19 11:14am]

Oh yes!

databank said:

Kares said:

And it's a disgrace that 3 years after his death, this is all we got so far.
.

[Edited 3/31/19 11:14am]

Entitled much?

databank said:

sulls said:

It'd be nice if the Estate would reach out to the Org for some collaboration.

I entirely agree, and have advocated for a while that the Estate would be well-advised to reach out to the community to just talk with the fans and that there are some of us who have an intimate knowledge of Prince's catalogue that could help making sensible choices when it comes to curating the archives.

.

Now as for Purpleized3121's suggestion I fail to understand the reasoning behind it. What can bootleggers possibly do for the Estate that the Estate needs? Which bootleggers specifically? And why bootleggers of all people? How could they possibly be of use when it comes to graphic design or liner notes of all things?

.

It has to be kept in mind that bootleggers do not really curate, particularly those who do it for profit. Usually they just put out whatever they can put their hands on and we often end-up with messy tracklists, and that's OK because that's what bootleggers do, but that's not what we should expect from the Estate.

.
None of us could do a good job at curating either before being contracted, signing an NDA and gaining full access to the vault, otherwise any release put together would inevitably omit potentially important tracks we don't know of yet. Most of us could come up with a list of stuff we know of that should be released, but none of us have the whole picture, we don't know what else is related to a particular project that we haven't heard of yet. There must be a lot of stuff that Prince recorded totally on his own, there are a lot of unmarked tape boxes, and it will take YEARS to go through and catalog everything, let alone transferring everything to hard drives.
.

billymeade said:

Kares said:

And it's a disgrace that 3 years after his death, this is all we got so far.
.

[Edited 3/31/19 11:14am]

Entitled much?

.

That is a dumb comment. It is not about me. The WORLD needs to hear Prince's legacy because he was so much more than the rock star they know.
Besides, my point was: it is a disgrace that important tracks such as the (almost) full version of Computer Blue and the other outtakes were released in poor quality. That means they won't be remastered from the genuine master tapes anytime soon. They've messed up.
.

Kares said:

databank said:

I entirely agree, and have advocated for a while that the Estate would be well-advised to reach out to the community to just talk with the fans and that there are some of us who have an intimate knowledge of Prince's catalogue that could help making sensible choices when it comes to curating the archives.

.

Now as for Purpleized3121's suggestion I fail to understand the reasoning behind it. What can bootleggers possibly do for the Estate that the Estate needs? Which bootleggers specifically? And why bootleggers of all people? How could they possibly be of use when it comes to graphic design or liner notes of all things?

.

It has to be kept in mind that bootleggers do not really curate, particularly those who do it for profit. Usually they just put out whatever they can put their hands on and we often end-up with messy tracklists, and that's OK because that's what bootleggers do, but that's not what we should expect from the Estate.

.
None of us could do a good job at curating either before being contracted, signing an NDA and gaining full access to the vault, otherwise any release put together would inevitably omit potentially important tracks we don't know of yet. Most of us could come up with a list of stuff we know of that should be released, but none of us have the whole picture, we don't know what else is related to a particular project that we haven't heard of yet. There must be a lot of stuff that Prince recorded totally on his own, there are a lot of unmarked tape boxes, and it will take YEARS to go through and catalog everything, let alone transferring everything to hard drives.
.

Of course, and I realize no fan is gonna move to Iron Mountain and work with M. Howe on a full time basis. However some counseling could be done, same way M. Bitton was asked for advice for PR Deluxe without being himself in the vault with M. Howe.

McD said:

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but haven’t the posthumous releases so far actually been from bootlegs, not the vault? Moonbeam Levels and the extra disc on Purple Rain sounded like bootlegs, not vault tracks, to me. In some cases blatantly so. And we all own boots that sound better than Piano and a Microphone ‘83, whatever the source of that was.

As far as we know everything that was released so far was sourced from cassettes not the original vault tapes.

Except NC2U that was apparently created from both the Prince and Family multitracks, or possibly a cassette of the Prince version + the Family multitracks.

NorthC said:

databank said:

I entirely agree, and have advocated for a while that the Estate would be well-advised to reach out to the community to just talk with the fans and that there are some of us who have an intimate knowledge of Prince's catalogue that could help making sensible choices when it comes to curating the archives.

.

Now as for Purpleized3121's suggestion I fail to understand the reasoning behind it. What can bootleggers possibly do for the Estate that the Estate needs? Which bootleggers specifically? And why bootleggers of all people? How could they possibly be of use when it comes to graphic design or liner notes of all things?

.

It has to be kept in mind that bootleggers do not really curate, particularly those who do it for profit. Usually they just put out whatever they can put their hands on and we often end-up with messy tracklists, and that's OK because that's what bootleggers do, but that's not what we should expect from the Estate.

Unfortunately, it is what we are getting from the estate.

I agree that so far they haven't done much of a better work than bootleggers :/

That doesn't mean they should go on like that, and that we can't hope for an improvement.

databank said:

Kares said:

.
None of us could do a good job at curating either before being contracted, signing an NDA and gaining full access to the vault, otherwise any release put together would inevitably omit potentially important tracks we don't know of yet. Most of us could come up with a list of stuff we know of that should be released, but none of us have the whole picture, we don't know what else is related to a particular project that we haven't heard of yet. There must be a lot of stuff that Prince recorded totally on his own, there are a lot of unmarked tape boxes, and it will take YEARS to go through and catalog everything, let alone transferring everything to hard drives.
.

Of course, and I realize no fan is gonna move to Iron Mountain and work with M. Howe on a full time basis.

.

Actually I would. It's my dream job. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Please keep bootleggers far away from any official release.
Bootlegger don;t know anything about tracks, they just try to profit of anything they can get.
But contacting or talk to those fans who have studied Prince for his entire carreer and who have a much deeper knowledge than the average bootleg collecting fan, should be a no brainer.
Some are even on here on Prince.org.

Kares said:

databank said:

Of course, and I realize no fan is gonna move to Iron Mountain and work with M. Howe on a full time basis.

.

Actually I would. It's my dream job. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

You would and I would, too, but neither of us could probably get a work visa in the US, so no we wouldn't. It's only really possible for American citizens.

.

Besides, I don't think they need an army of guys locked in Iron Mountain 5 days a week archiving and filing stuff, what they need is project-based advisors.

databank said:

Kares said:

.

Actually I would. It's my dream job. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

You would and I would, too, but neither of us could probably get a work visa in the US, so no we wouldn't. It's only really possible for American citizens.

.
I know... (Where do you live?)
.

databank said:

.

Besides, I don't think they need an army of guys locked in Iron Mountain 5 days a week archiving and filing stuff, what they need is project-based advisors.

.

It's actually my biggest concern about the vault that they take this project-focused approach – instead of systematically archiving literally everything: every single multitrack, every single mixdown tape, every single rehearsal tape (both audio and video), every single live recording, and then transferring all the films and videos.
In my view it would be a grave mistake to only transfer what's needed for a planned release.
.
Absolutely everything needs to be transferred to archival HDD systems, including all the digital magnetic tapes (DASH and DAT), optical disks, portable and internal hard drives, pendrives etc. And I can only hope they have collected every data storage formats from Paisley, although I very much doubt they removed all hard drives too.
.
If they would really archive and transfer absolutely everything as they should, then they would indeed need a dedicated team working there full time for many years, as I'm pretty sure there's enough material to work on for many years.
.

[Edited 4/2/19 2:37am]

Kares said:

databank said:

.
I know... (Where do you live?)
.

I'm a EU citizen like you (well, at least for another 2 weeks )

.

databank said:

.

Besides, I don't think they need an army of guys locked in Iron Mountain 5 days a week archiving and filing stuff, what they need is project-based advisors.

.

It's actually my biggest concern about the vault that they take this project-focused approach – instead of systematically archiving literally everything: every single multitrack, every single mixdown tape, every single rehearsal tape (both audio and video), every single live recording, and then transferring all the films and videos.
In my view it would be a grave mistake to only transfer what's needed for a planned release.
.
Absolutely everything needs to be transferred to archival HDD systems, including all the digital magnetic tapes (DASH and DAT), optical disks, portable and internal hard drives, pendrives etc. And I can only hope they have collected every data storage formats from Paisley, although I very much doubt they removed all hard drives too.
.
If they would really archive and transfer absolutely everything as they should, then they would indeed need a dedicated team working there full time for many years, as I'm pretty sure there's enough material to work on for many years.
.

I totally agree that they need to file everything and then process to transfers, but despite the enormous amount of material I would assume that one archivist (M. Howe) who's basically capable of figuring out what's what and a couple of engineers working on it 40 hours a week would probably be sufficient. Now I don't know if they're evn doing that at all but M. Howe must certainly be doing something if curating the vault is his one and only full-time job.

databank said:

I totally agree that they need to file everything and then process to transfers, but despite the enormous amount of material I would assume that one archivist (M. Howe) who's basically capable of figuring out what's what and a couple of engineers working on it 40 hours a week would probably be sufficient. Now I don't know if they're evn doing that at all but M. Howe must certainly be doing something if curating the vault is his one and only full-time job.

.

.

I'm not sure if it's his only job – he's vice president and A&R of Inveniem, a company that works with many estates and collections, incl. Zappa's, for example, so even if his focus is the Prince Vault, he could have other responsibilities too.
.
But either way, the sheer amount of tapes, films, photos, hard drives etc Prince left behind is so vast, it will take many years to professionally transfer and archive everything, even with a larger team working full time. It takes a long time to inspect, photograph, inventory just one reel and prepare it for being transferred to computer, then to do the actual transfer and create an accurate log of all test tones, faults, drop-outs, splices, etc etc – it's a VERY time consuming job if you want to do it properly. Trust me, it would take many years with the TENS of thousands reels of tape and film and hard drives he's left behind. And I'm very worried they don't even consider archiving everything and would only do what they want to release.
.

Kares said:

databank said:

I totally agree that they need to file everything and then process to transfers, but despite the enormous amount of material I would assume that one archivist (M. Howe) who's basically capable of figuring out what's what and a couple of engineers working on it 40 hours a week would probably be sufficient. Now I don't know if they're evn doing that at all but M. Howe must certainly be doing something if curating the vault is his one and only full-time job.

.

.

I'm not sure if it's his only job – he's vice president and A&R of Inveniem, a company that works with many estates and collections, incl. Zappa's, for example, so even if his focus is the Prince Vault, he could have other responsibilities too.
.
But either way, the sheer amount of tapes, films, photos, hard drives etc Prince left behind is so vast, it will take many years to professionally transfer and archive everything, even with a larger team working full time. It takes a long time to inspect, photograph, inventory just one reel and prepare it for being transferred to computer, then to do the actual transfer and create an accurate log of all test tones, faults, drop-outs, splices, etc etc – it's a VERY time consuming job if you want to do it properly. Trust me, it would take many years with the TENS of thousands reels of tape and film and hard drives he's left behind. And I'm very worried they don't even consider archiving everything and would only do what they want to release.
.

I see, I didn't know about Mr. Howe's other commitments.

Very time consuming and also expensive I guess, although Prince had a whole staff but without touring IDK how much money his music generates now without the tours.

We can only hope...

databank said:

Kares said:

.

Actually I would. It's my dream job. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

You would and I would, too, but neither of us could probably get a work visa in the US, so no we wouldn't. It's only really possible for American citizens.

.

Besides, I don't think they need an army of guys locked in Iron Mountain 5 days a week archiving and filing stuff, what they need is project-based advisors.

Databank, I'm pretty sure that -- based on your expertise -- you'd qualify for at least a short-term professional visa, to consult, if WB or whoever wanted to make that happen...

dustoff said:

databank said:

You would and I would, too, but neither of us could probably get a work visa in the US, so no we wouldn't. It's only really possible for American citizens.

.

Besides, I don't think they need an army of guys locked in Iron Mountain 5 days a week archiving and filing stuff, what they need is project-based advisors.

Databank, I'm pretty sure that -- based on your expertise -- you'd qualify for at least a short-term professional visa, to consult, if WB or whoever wanted to make that happen...

Why, thanks, but my expertise remains an amateur's expertise. It is not backed by degrees related to the music business or journalism, or a recognized professional experience in these domains, and as someone who's been living abroad for nearly a decade, I know them work visas ain't always so easy to get if you don't have the proper documentation to provide.

.

To be fair I must also say that there are many others in the community whose knowledge of Prince's musical career is just as great as mine or better, many of which are already American citizens or in possession of an American visa. At best, doing my website has forced me to adopt a factual approach and a rational method, trying to walk in Uptown/Princevault's footsteps when it comes to doing serious research and trying not to not let my personal feelings cloud my judgement, but I don't believe my website is of a nature to get me a job let alone a visa. Now I'm among those who'd love to help and I truly believe than when it comes to dealing with such a massive amount of material to curate, hardcore fans and Prince researchers should definitely be consulted, but I'm sure there are some of those at hand in the US, that probably are easier to work with than fans leaving on the other side of the world. If anyone, they should try and work with Duane at least for the eras he's researched intensively, so as long as they don't reach out to him, it's unlikely they'll reach out to anyone else save people who are already in the music industry such as Matthieu Bitton (and he's not the only one).

JorisE73 said:

Please keep bootleggers far away from any official release.
Bootlegger don;t know anything about tracks, they just try to profit of anything they can get.
But contacting or talk to those fans who have studied Prince for his entire carreer and who have a much deeper knowledge than the average bootleg collecting fan, should be a no brainer.
Some are even on here on Prince.org.

sorry, don't agree. I have met & have spoken with some hard core bootleggers in the past & they too are hardcore fans who have much knowledge.

Agree re working with fans....but if no serious product is forthcoming then it just wont happen!

I see we have touched a nerve here

Being logical here....in my opinion, the best releases I have seen came from Eye. They went all out for their releases (I MAY have a few myself) They know who the guy is, so he would not be "outting" himself and have an agreement that he no longer put out releases on his own. That being said, they could learn a lot from someone who put a considerable amount of time and energy (obviously not alone) in to putting out amazingly well produced releases.

Why not keep your enemies close and learn from them. Casinos do this, the feds do this, the antivirus companies do this.... a lot of organizations learn a lot from those they once vilified.

Certainly not the worst idea and worth a conversation anyway.

4anothertime said: