Realistically, given the sheer volume, the complexity of the legal situation of ownership / writing credits, the cost of launching each set & the potentially lower than expected sales is it really worth anyone buying the vault contents?

Am I correct in recalling Londell etc nearly sold it for $35m? If that were the case how could any investor ever hope to at least break-even? Yes there's the bragging rights of someone owning the vault BUT making it commercially viable I would suggest is an impossibility. estate should have grabbed that $35m!!

Personally , if i were the CEO i'd call it a bad investment & stay away unless everything were uploaded via an NPG style streaming / down-load site. The trouble of course being how many subscribers / hard core are there that would pay say $100.00 a year for amazing content - 100k subscribers = $10m p/a return ...but is that viable - are there still 100k hardcore left?!

PURPLEIZED3121 said:

Am I correct in recalling Londell etc nearly sold it for $35m? If that were the case how could any investor ever hope to at least break-even? Yes there's the bragging rights of someone owning the vault BUT making it commercially viable I would suggest is an impossibility. estate should have grabbed that $35m!!

.

If you care so much, how about GOOGLING this?

I think it's definately a sound investment but it's going to take a bit of time learning how to optimize the vast amount of content.

You have to be a bit patient with it, which is something financiers suck at.

It might take 10-15 years to actualize the return...but once you do that, it's pure gravy.

Think of just the possibility of releasing full soundboard recordings of all of Prince's concerts and soundchecks, starting with the Capri shows in early 1979. You charge $10 a pop flat rate.

Let's conservatively say that Prince has 10,000 SUPER HARD CORE fans WW who would all be willing to pay $500-1K a person for this content (I would and I am not rich). That would just be $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 alone.

Then you add in the HARD CORE fans, of which there might be 30,000 WW who would be willing to spend $200-400 a person... This would be $6,000,000 to $12,000,000.

Then, the GENERAL FANS, of which there might be 100,000 WW...of which they might be willing to pay $20-40 a head... Of which, would bring in $2M to $4M.

All of this, taken in aggregate would be ~13M to 26M...and this is just for the concerts and soundchecks, not including the unreleased tracks that would be added to DELUXE editions of classic albums.

PURPLEIZED3121 said:

Realistically, given the sheer volume, the complexity of the legal situation of ownership / writing credits, the cost of launching each set & the potentially lower than expected sales is it really worth anyone buying the vault contents?

Am I correct in recalling Londell etc nearly sold it for $35m? If that were the case how could any investor ever hope to at least break-even? Yes there's the bragging rights of someone owning the vault BUT making it commercially viable I would suggest is an impossibility. estate should have grabbed that $35m!!

Personally , if i were the CEO i'd call it a bad investment & stay away unless everything were uploaded via an NPG style streaming / down-load site. The trouble of course being how many subscribers / hard core are there that would pay say $100.00 a year for amazing content - 100k subscribers = $10m p/a return ...but is that viable - are there still 100k hardcore left?!

They can't sell 100,000 albums, they won't find 100,000 of us willing to stump up $100 a year. There's not many of us hardcore fans.

As big as Prince is, you'd think there'd at least be 100,000 of us hardcore fans around the world and willing to pay

Fans like the idea of a streaming/online service because the idea of having everything at your fingertips is a dream come true, but it doesn't make an ounce of sense for the estate or a record company to do that. The number of people genuinely interested in something like this is far smaller than the number of people willing to buy an annual or bi-annual release of vault material or a remaster. It's not just about raw numbers either, the Vault has a mystique that is part of Prince's legacy. Throwing back the curtain in one fell swoop does really not help maintain and strengthen that legacy.

.

I understand it can be frustrating for fans to know there is this huge wealth of material you are mentally drooling over but this is a pipedream. Have patience and enjoy the huge amount of material we already have and that is growing year on year. You will never hear it all, you will never have it all. And even if you did, then what?

if they showed the world some of the BEST stuff ..they would get more interest

jfenster said:

if they showed the world some of the BEST stuff ..they would get more interest

I wouldn't think so, no, except for the part where it's now incredibly difficult to make money selling music.

The only real money to be made anymore is from concerts.

That said, I'd say it's a worthwhile investment if, for nothing else, people like us who will buy it up. Problem is, everyone has a different idea of what;'s "good" and usually has when it comes to Prince's stuff, especially the obscure and more experimetnal things.

If they gathered up several of the pro shot live stuff and a bunch of aftershows, they couod recoup their investment just from orgers alone. But the longer they wait the more free stuff on Youtube will cut the legs out from under it.

Hardly anyone pays for music anymore

I can't imagine the vault in and of itself could be worth that much. I don't know a whole lot about royalties but based on what I know about Spotify and YouTube, you'd never get anywhere near enough streams to justify that kind of investment.

And sales? Dadgum, if you made $1 million per release, you'd have to release about 50 albums in order to make it a good deal.

Let's assume that you need to earn $50 million on your $35 million investment in order to make it a good investment. Let's further assume that you can make $5 million on streams. So you need to make $45,000,000 from physical/internet sales, or 90% of your total revenue.

If 10% of your income is streaming income, and you want to make $1,000,000 per release, then you need to net after taxes $900,000 per release.

Let's further assume - and believe me, I am putting the "ASS" in assume here, because these are complete guesses - that your mix of sales is 35% physical sales and 65% internet/download sales.

I'm guessing that a great profit margin on a physical release would be 20%. Let's assume that the Estate sells each release wholesale to wrecka stows and distributors for $12.50, which are then sold retail for $20. The Estate's profit is 20% of $12.50, or $2.50 per unit.

For download sales, I'm asuming a profit margin of 40% on a direct-to-the-consumer price of $15 per unit. The Estate's profit is 40% of $15.00, or $6 per unit.

With that 65% download/35% physical sales using those net profit margins, and needing to make a total of $900,000 per release, then you need:

85,000 physical sales
154,457 download sales

That's 239,457 total unit sales, plus the streaming income.

For one release.

You need 50 releases to make $50,000,000.

Which means you have to sell:

4,250,000 physical units
7,722,838 downloaded units
$5,000,00 in streaming income

Sounds like a tall order to me, especially considering it would take two or three decades tp put out 50 releases.

What exactly do you mean by „Corporation“? Major-Labels taking over Prince's vault? That would indeed be pointless as they do not know how to organize their own vaults, let alone the vault of a prolific artist.

But it would not be pointless by any means if NPG Records was using its power to negotiate a good liscensing-deal for future vault-releases. All they have to do is meet up with Ahmet Zappa who runs the Zappa Family Trust and has released a great wealth of recordings from Frank Zappa's vault, which even came in rather splendid, lavish packagings. As a dedicated FZ-fan, I do not think that Zappa-releases have a larger market than Prince-vault-releases. But what the Zappa Family Trust has understood early on is that it caters a specialst-market. And it has listened to what FZ-fans really want. Also, they emloy Joe Travers, an avid FZ-fan, as „Vaultmeister“, who really knows what he's doing and therefore is running the archive from finding tapes to baking them to copying sensitive tape-material onto high resolution hard drives. And, boy, did we get a lot of live-material lately. Six shows from NYC 1977, Zappa In New York 1976 extended from 2 to 5 discs, and Royce Hall 1975 is next on 2 CDs.

As you see, it's possible if Prince's estate really wishes to cater for a specialist market. But the Zappa's do mostly produce limited edition-packages, which, by now, have all sold out. And they also don't liscence out stuff to different coporations.

By the way, Zappa's vault rests besides Prince's vault in the Iron Mountain storage fracility in Los Angeles. The two „Vaultmeisters“ should meet up so that the Prince-guy can actually learn something from Joe Travers.

The value shouldn't be thought of as solely monetary; it has enormous cultural value that deserves to be preserved regardless of ROI.

The Vault is now in california right? If the state falls into the ocean one day, it will definitely be worthless. They really need some redundancy for the vault material. If California goes, so does the vault, game over, no more music.

I hope someone has the foresight to copy the contents once everything is cataloged and store the copies elsewhere. His music is too important to leave to chance.

The big one will hit, that is a fact nobody disputes, it's just a matter of when.

When the best scientests in the world say could be tomorrow, or could be 1000 years, it makes ya wonder how far has science really come.

ItsOnlyMountains said:

The value shouldn't be thought of as solely monetary; it has enormous cultural value that deserves to be preserved regardless of ROI.

That sounds great, until it's your I that needs the R.

Which means that unless someone with so much money that not making a return on - or even not getting the return of - their money is OK, then we have to focus on strategies that pay for themselves.

RodeoSchro said:

I can't imagine the vault in and of itself could be worth that much. I don't know a whole lot about royalties but based on what I know about Spotify and YouTube, you'd never get anywhere near enough streams to justify that kind of investment.

And sales? Dadgum, if you made $1 million per release, you'd have to release about 50 albums in order to make it a good deal.

Let's assume that you need to earn $50 million on your $35 million investment in order to make it a good investment. Let's further assume that you can make $5 million on streams. So you need to make $45,000,000 from physical/internet sales, or 90% of your total revenue.

If 10% of your income is streaming income, and you want to make $1,000,000 per release, then you need to net after taxes $900,000 per release.

Let's further assume - and believe me, I am putting the "ASS" in assume here, because these are complete guesses - that your mix of sales is 35% physical sales and 65% internet/download sales.

I'm guessing that a great profit margin on a physical release would be 20%. Let's assume that the Estate sells each release wholesale to wrecka stows and distributors for $12.50, which are then sold retail for $20. The Estate's profit is 20% of $12.50, or $2.50 per unit.

For download sales, I'm asuming a profit margin of 40% on a direct-to-the-consumer price of $15 per unit. The Estate's profit is 40% of $15.00, or $6 per unit.

With that 65% download/35% physical sales using those net profit margins, and needing to make a total of $900,000 per release, then you need:

85,000 physical sales
154,457 download sales

That's 239,457 total unit sales, plus the streaming income.

For one release.

You need 50 releases to make $50,000,000.

Which means you have to sell:

4,250,000 physical units
7,722,838 downloaded units
$5,000,00 in streaming income

Sounds like a tall order to me, especially considering it would take two or three decades tp put out 50 releases.

... and yet originals hasn't surpassed 30,000 in the U.S. in 2 weeks, and will be off the top 50 by the 3rd week.

Strive said:

The answer is "lol no" There's an arms-race going on for video content, which the vault has in spades, and the Hendrix estate is still releasing "new" albums 50 years after he died. Did anybody think that would be the case after the initial hype died down? Hypothetical. If Amazon spent 300 million to buy the estate outright at its current estimated value. Like Prince becomes exclusive to Amazon services, they own the vault, a few years from now all the Prince albums - outside of Purple Rain, Parade, Batman, Graffiti Bridge - are theirs to do what they want with licensing-wise, they get to put Prince's likeness on whatever they want, the Paisley tour becomes free for Prime members. That would be the steal of the century. It would be viewed like Michael Jackson purchasing ATV for $50 million in 1985.

Exactly. the soundtrack albums (as well as protege albums) and their licensing and distribution belonged to Warner "in perpetuity", per the stipulations of the 2014 contract. On top of that, he only retained licensing within the US. All other territories still belong to WB.

So unless someone else buys WB out, the licensing and distribution rights are staying with them.

"The 2014 deal, for which Prince was represented by attorney and CNN commentator Van Jones, had different terms for certain albums: Warner retained the rights to soundtrack albums to Warner Bros. films — including Prince’s biggest-selling albums, “Purple Rain,” “Parade,” and “Batman “– in perpetuity. But the other albums were subject to varying terms, territories (Warner retains non-U.S. rights to most recordings in perpetuity), formats (digital vs. physical), and term lengths."

https://variety.com/2017/...202031182/

[Edited 7/8/19 22:35pm]

BartVanHemelen said:

PURPLEIZED3121 said:

Am I correct in recalling Londell etc nearly sold it for $35m? If that were the case how could any investor ever hope to at least break-even? Yes there's the bragging rights of someone owning the vault BUT making it commercially viable I would suggest is an impossibility. estate should have grabbed that $35m!!

.

If you care so much, how about GOOGLING this?

Maybe because it's a forum for discussion, and it's started an interesting discussion

Someone got out of the wrong side of bed today. Again.

leecaldon said:

BartVanHemelen said:

.

If you care so much, how about GOOGLING this?

Maybe because it's a forum for discussion, and it's started an interesting discussion

Someone got out of the wrong side of bed today. Again.

.

Yeah, I'm the one at fault here. Not the person who spewed incorrect nonsense he couldn't be arsed to research.

The only one to blame is prince: he should and could have started a "from the archives" series decades ago, instead he failed to even maintain his vault.

.

Meanwhile Bob Dylan: http://www.bobdylan.com/n...ecordings/ And that's just one example. How about a fringe artist: https://burningshed.com/s...on-boxsets .

is the VAULT a worthless / pointless investment for any corporation?

If they release the stuff now, whilst we're all still alive to buy it - No

If they release the stuff in 30 years time - Yes

BartVanHemelen said:

PURPLEIZED3121 said:

Am I correct in recalling Londell etc nearly sold it for $35m? If that were the case how could any investor ever hope to at least break-even? Yes there's the bragging rights of someone owning the vault BUT making it commercially viable I would suggest is an impossibility. estate should have grabbed that $35m!!

.

If you care so much, how about GOOGLING this?

oh Bart. really!!

leecaldon said:

BartVanHemelen said:

.

If you care so much, how about GOOGLING this?

Maybe because it's a forum for discussion, and it's started an interesting discussion

Someone got out of the wrong side of bed today. Again.

think BVH forgets that we have lives & really don't have the time to do endless research to validate a minor point! He does need to get out more!

PURPLEIZED3121 said:

Realistically, given the sheer volume, the complexity of the legal situation of ownership / writing credits, the cost of launching each set & the potentially lower than expected sales is it really worth anyone buying the vault contents?

Am I correct in recalling Londell etc nearly sold it for $35m? If that were the case how could any investor ever hope to at least break-even? Yes there's the bragging rights of someone owning the vault BUT making it commercially viable I would suggest is an impossibility. estate should have grabbed that $35m!!

Personally , if i were the CEO i'd call it a bad investment & stay away unless everything were uploaded via an NPG style streaming / down-load site. The trouble of course being how many subscribers / hard core are there that would pay say $100.00 a year for amazing content - 100k subscribers = $10m p/a return ...but is that viable - are there still 100k hardcore left?!

It is actually a good question. Fans like us know what's in there but others don't. My view is that the estate needs to do something that Prince did not typically do - exploit his music in movies. Make the movie a vehicle for his amazing songs. Specifically, I think they need to choose unreleased material for a movie. This is the BEST way to get his music out there. Let me give you a great example of how this works. My son is 8, and he watches a cartoon called 'Motown'. This little guy has been singing 'Dancing Machine', 'My Girl', 'Dancing in the Street' and others classics on his own..doing the spins and everything!!! He searches for the songs in Spotify and sings them. I couldn't believe it when he sang 'Ben' that other day.

Prince's body of work is so huge, there is something for any mood or event. This is the best way to spark serious interest in his music which will snowball into far far more. We need a exec in charge who can work this out.

BartVanHemelen said:

The only one to blame is prince: he should and could have started a "from the archives" series decades ago, instead he failed to even maintain his vault.

.

Meanwhile Bob Dylan: http://www.bobdylan.com/n...ecordings/ And that's just one example. How about a fringe artist: https://burningshed.com/s...on-boxsets .

Despite Bart being such a long time follower, I think he simply has missed the core of the man - he was an ARTIST. He was not good at commerce and did not care much for it either. As we have heard so many times, his heart was in the music first.....Craig Rice told Michael Dean how Prince was not a flashy spender...in fact, his money was spent on instruments and at times he'd PAY to play. He would fly the whole band out to play a charity. The man was lightening focused on his music from start to finish. Sure, he made money but that was never the focus so knowing this, it is NO surprise that he never started a 'from the vault' type series. Trust me, I would have loved it if he did and I wish he had people around him who were able to convince him of this but...he didn't.

JoeyCococo said:

PURPLEIZED3121 said:

Realistically, given the sheer volume, the complexity of the legal situation of ownership / writing credits, the cost of launching each set & the potentially lower than expected sales is it really worth anyone buying the vault contents?

Am I correct in recalling Londell etc nearly sold it for $35m? If that were the case how could any investor ever hope to at least break-even? Yes there's the bragging rights of someone owning the vault BUT making it commercially viable I would suggest is an impossibility. estate should have grabbed that $35m!!

Personally , if i were the CEO i'd call it a bad investment & stay away unless everything were uploaded via an NPG style streaming / down-load site. The trouble of course being how many subscribers / hard core are there that would pay say $100.00 a year for amazing content - 100k subscribers = $10m p/a return ...but is that viable - are there still 100k hardcore left?!

It is actually a good question. Fans like us know what's in there but others don't. My view is that the estate needs to do something that Prince did not typically do - exploit his music in movies. Make the movie a vehicle for his amazing songs. Specifically, I think they need to choose unreleased material for a movie. This is the BEST way to get his music out there. Let me give you a great example of how this works. My son is 8, and he watches a cartoon called 'Motown'. This little guy has been singing 'Dancing Machine', 'My Girl', 'Dancing in the Street' and others classics on his own..doing the spins and everything!!! He searches for the songs in Spotify and sings them. I couldn't believe it when he sang 'Ben' that other day.

Prince's body of work is so huge, there is something for any mood or event. This is the best way to spark serious interest in his music which will snowball into far far more. We need a exec in charge who can work this out.

I'm a little scared that future generations won't really know who Prince was.

feeluupp said:

RodeoSchro said:

I can't imagine the vault in and of itself could be worth that much. I don't know a whole lot about royalties but based on what I know about Spotify and YouTube, you'd never get anywhere near enough streams to justify that kind of investment.

And sales? Dadgum, if you made $1 million per release, you'd have to release about 50 albums in order to make it a good deal.

Let's assume that you need to earn $50 million on your $35 million investment in order to make it a good investment. Let's further assume that you can make $5 million on streams. So you need to make $45,000,000 from physical/internet sales, or 90% of your total revenue.

If 10% of your income is streaming income, and you want to make $1,000,000 per release, then you need to net after taxes $900,000 per release.

Let's further assume - and believe me, I am putting the "ASS" in assume here, because these are complete guesses - that your mix of sales is 35% physical sales and 65% internet/download sales.

I'm guessing that a great profit margin on a physical release would be 20%. Let's assume that the Estate sells each release wholesale to wrecka stows and distributors for $12.50, which are then sold retail for $20. The Estate's profit is 20% of $12.50, or $2.50 per unit.

For download sales, I'm asuming a profit margin of 40% on a direct-to-the-consumer price of $15 per unit. The Estate's profit is 40% of $15.00, or $6 per unit.

With that 65% download/35% physical sales using those net profit margins, and needing to make a total of $900,000 per release, then you need:

85,000 physical sales
154,457 download sales

That's 239,457 total unit sales, plus the streaming income.

For one release.

You need 50 releases to make $50,000,000.

Which means you have to sell:

4,250,000 physical units
7,722,838 downloaded units
$5,000,00 in streaming income

Sounds like a tall order to me, especially considering it would take two or three decades tp put out 50 releases.

... and yet originals hasn't surpassed 30,000 in the U.S. in 2 weeks, and will be off the top 50 by the 3rd week.

Exactly. If one's intent is to make money off their investment in the vault, I'd be hard-pressed to see how one could do that with a $35,000,000+ investment. But again, I'm certainly no expert about the business side of music.

PURPLEIZED3121 said:

leecaldon said:

Maybe because it's a forum for discussion, and it's started an interesting discussion

Someone got out of the wrong side of bed today. Again.

think BVH forgets that we have lives & really don't have the time to do endless research to validate a minor point! He does need to get out more!

.

You had the time to write up your post, yet couldn't find the time to enter a couple of keywords into Google.

.

Also, there have been a grand total of TWO post-humous deals. TWO. Not five or twelve or twenty. TWO. So is it that much trouble to investigate the subject for five seconds before writing a bunch of INCORRECT stuff?

BartVanHemelen said:

The only one to blame is prince: he should and could have started a "from the archives" series decades ago, instead he failed to even maintain his vault.

.

Meanwhile Bob Dylan: http://www.bobdylan.com/n...ecordings/ And that's just one example. How about a fringe artist: https://burningshed.com/s...on-boxsets .

Hmmm, I'm not too sure about that.

Prince wasn't a businessman, even though I am sure he liked to think he was.

Prince wasn't an organised person, as most creative people aren't.

Yet we all know for sure Prince looked forward musically and creatively. His time was best spent creating, recording and leaving each day in the past.

I'm please Prince didn't waste time on archive releases as otherwise he would not have spent time creating.

We all know Prince did say the vault will one day be heard and he did say it would be others to do that and make that happen.

BartVanHemelen said:

PURPLEIZED3121 said:

think BVH forgets that we have lives & really don't have the time to do endless research to validate a minor point! He does need to get out more!

.

You had the time to write up your post, yet couldn't find the time to enter a couple of keywords into Google.

.

Also, there have been a grand total of TWO post-humous deals. TWO. Not five or twelve or twenty. TWO. So is it that much trouble to investigate the subject for five seconds before writing a bunch of INCORRECT stuff?

Bart - Over the past 20 years you've castigated countless numbers of people an uncountable number of times for not doing what you call simple research.

And yet...you still haven't educated the world or changed anyone's behavior. In fact, I bet you know that there are some people here who purposefully try to get your goat by not doing what you think they should in the way of research. They succeed, too. That can't bring you pleasure.

Get it through your head - no matter how much you yell at someone because they did not do the research you felt they should have, you will not change, nor have ever changed, a single person's behavior.

And - no matter how egregious you think someone's lack of research may be, exactly zero point zero Orgers have been banned, snipped or taken to task by a mod for it. Ergo, what you get mad about isn't against any rule, and therefore is not worthy of a complaint. (But you and I do know a person who has been banned in relation to these kinds of complaints, don't we?)

Unless you take pleasure in making yourself look foolish by trying to bring another person down, I can see no reason for you to continue this kind of behavior.

.

[Edited 7/9/19 8:59am]