Hi and hope ev'ry1's washin' their hands and keepin safe 'n healthy. I was on Ebay earlier and was looking 4 Prince stuff and they're sellin' these, what I suspect are, unofficial two-disc sets of his albums including "The Black Album" and "Camille." There may have already been a post with regard 2 this and if so, apologies. What R these, who's releasing them and they're pretty pricey. I think they're CDr's. Anyone else seen or heard of this label?

Hi whitechocolatebrotha,

Yes, these are unofficial / unlicensed products. These bootlegs are primarily distributed from Japan, although you do occasionally see a few copies floating around in Europe. They produce sliver back pressed CDs and DVDs. Not CD-Rs. They rarely release anything original and mainly repackage existing bootlegs.

The Black Album they offer is actually DJ Foefur’s remaster (a fan made remaster from around the late 90s / early 00s). Many of their remastered albums are actually the Foefur’s remasters although there are exceptions, Camille being one of them.

I have a small handful of these, including the Camille release. The album claims to have been sourced from the Camille test pressing. It isn’t. It’s actually a reconstruction from released tracks with the exception of ‘Rebirth of the Flesh’ which was taken from an existing bootleg of the ‘Crystal Ball’ album. Likely the Irukandji release. Since their modus operandi seems to be repackaging existing bootlegs and leaks it’s possible that they believed it really was the test pressing at the time, but as far as I’m aware that has never leaked, at least not amongst the wider public.

I hope this helps. If you have any more questions about these please fire away. ;o)

If you're ever unsure if something you see is official or not just look at the discography on princevault.com or even wikipedia for that matter. Anything that looks fishy 99.8% of the time will be.

I have a dozen PGA titles and I love them all. Yeah, they're bootlegs but they're really well done. My only complaint is that a few of the titles have some of the same tracks. I guess they wanted to fill up the entire disc, but it is kind of annoying.

I love PGA!!

The quality is unmatched compared to his albums.

I have almost all of their releases, and 75% of them is an upgrade from releases elsewhere.

MIInsane said:

I have a dozen PGA titles and I love them all. Yeah, they're bootlegs but they're really well done. My only complaint is that a few of the titles have some of the same tracks. I guess they wanted to fill up the entire disc, but it is kind of annoying.

.

Most of them are pirate releases, actually, not bootlegs. They're not the same.

Kares said:

Kares said:

MIInsane said:

I have a dozen PGA titles and I love them all. Yeah, they're bootlegs but they're really well done. My only complaint is that a few of the titles have some of the same tracks. I guess they wanted to fill up the entire disc, but it is kind of annoying.

.

Most of them are pirate releases, actually, not bootlegs. They're not the same.

Not entirely.

Although a lot of their catalogue includes “remastered” / rearranged versions of official albums, almost all of them includes some portion of unreleased material, be it a live show, studio outtakes, unreleased alternate version, or some mixture of the above.

In addition to the rearranged albums they have also released stand alone live shows (4 Those of You On Valium, Prince’s Birthday Parade, New Years Eve ‘87, First Avenue ‘83), aftershows, The Flesh sessions, test pressings (Come), unreleased configurations of albums (Exodus). There is a mixture of stuff in addition to straight pirated albums.