What I find most laughable is they had The Family performing, in the estates own words, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of an album that is out of print in physical media and not available on any streaming sites.

it really is amateur hour

I hope they don't let the year pass w/o a release announcement. I also hope they don't give up on the big box set ideas. Let the ones that want and can afford it, have the full sets. Sure, it may cost more but let it be. However, go ahead and break the rest up in smaller bites for those that can't afford. Maybe even start just putting out remasters of earlier albums w/o a fulsome box set treatment.

muleFunk said:

MIRvmn1 said:

More info from an attende. "HITnRUN Phase One and Two are being reissued on vinyl, They are looking into a streaming service npgmusicclub that prince supposedly left “blueprints” for, Sony representative mentioned uploading concert footage to Tubi, as it's more profitable for them. Londell also mentioned possible deals with movie theaters to show concert footage. Londell mentioned they want a schedule like 1 big release, 1 mini one and various digital only singles spread throughout" Well lot's of promises. I believe it when I see it. [Edited 6/7/25 23:35pm]

That's the same formula that the former administrators had and one they should stick to. I think the biggest revelation was that only 45% of the vault had been digitized.

Jesus Christ, and after all this time too.

rap said:

muleFunk said:

MIRvmn1 said: That's the same formula that the former administrators had and one they should stick to. I think the biggest revelation was that only 45% of the vault had been digitized.

Jesus Christ, and after all this time too.

Maybe you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe they've only digitized 45% because of the sheer amount of material? Admittedly, I don't know how long digitizing musical assets would take on average, but I think it's reasonable to assume that Prince probably had above average number of items.

Then again, it could be simply due to incompentence. Or maybe some combination of both.

DevotedPuppy said:

rap said:

Jesus Christ, and after all this time too.

Maybe you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe they've only digitized 45% because of the sheer amount of material? Admittedly, I don't know how long digitizing musical assets would take on average, but I think it's reasonable to assume that Prince probably had above average number of items.

Then again, it could be simply due to incompentence. Or maybe some combination of both.

I'm not being critical, just rather amazed, that's all.

McMillan stressed the importance of truthfulness, asserting that while they aren't trying to "sugar coat," they "won’t allow false narratives." He urged fans with social media or podcasts to "hold people accountable for disrespecting Prince," particularly those who "start to take credit for Prince’s work."


Seriously? 85% of the guest speakers at the Celebration who have since he died tried to take credit for Prince's work.

The Estate keeps inviting them back year after year.......

PennyPurple said:

McMillan stressed the importance of truthfulness, asserting that while they aren't trying to "sugar coat," they "won’t allow false narratives." He urged fans with social media or podcasts to "hold people accountable for disrespecting Prince," particularly those who "start to take credit for Prince’s work."


Seriously? 85% of the guest speakers at the Celebration who have since he died tried to take credit for Prince's work.

The Estate keeps inviting them back year after year.......

They really are the worst possible people to be running this estate. What a sad state of affairs.

PennyPurple said:

rap said:

muleFunk said:

MIRvmn1 said: That's the same formula that the former administrators had and one they should stick to. I think the biggest revelation was that only 45% of the vault had been digitized.

Jesus Christ, and after all this time too.

it highlights just how much was in the Vault

muleFunk said:

PennyPurple said:

McMillan stressed the importance of truthfulness, asserting that while they aren't trying to "sugar coat," they "won’t allow false narratives." He urged fans with social media or podcasts to "hold people accountable for disrespecting Prince," particularly those who "start to take credit for Prince’s work."


Seriously? 85% of the guest speakers at the Celebration who have since he died tried to take credit for Prince's work.

The Estate keeps inviting them back year after year.......

Morris Day tried to copyright The Time less than 3 hours after Prince died.

any proof of that?

mattosgood said:

rap said:

Jesus Christ, and after all this time too.

it highlights just how much was in the Vault

It also highlights that properly digitizing a large archive is (really) expensive, time-consuming, and complex. I have some professional experience with a 15,000-tape archive and people are usually surprised when they learn how much the project cost.

olb99 said:

mattosgood said:

it highlights just how much was in the Vault

It also highlights that properly digitizing a large archive is (really) expensive, time-consuming, and complex. I have some professional experience with a 15,000-tape archive and people are usually surprised when they learn how much the project cost.

Of course, and due respect to true professionals. But lend the Vault keys to a bootlegger for a couple of days and I'd be happy for the next dacade.

muleFunk said:

PennyPurple said:

McMillan stressed the importance of truthfulness, asserting that while they aren't trying to "sugar coat," they "won’t allow false narratives." He urged fans with social media or podcasts to "hold people accountable for disrespecting Prince," particularly those who "start to take credit for Prince’s work."


Seriously? 85% of the guest speakers at the Celebration who have since he died tried to take credit for Prince's work.

The Estate keeps inviting them back year after year.......

Morris Day tried to copyright The Time less than 3 hours after Prince died.

That's right I forgot about that

Wife #2 also tried to copyright stuff too

mattosgood said:

psyche2 said:

olb99 said:

It also highlights that properly digitizing a large archive is (really) expensive, time-consuming, and complex. I have some professional experience with a 15,000-tape archive and people are usually surprised when they learn how much the project cost.

Of course, and due respect to true professionals. But lend the Vault keys to a bootlegger for a couple of days and I'd be happy for the next dacade.

.

The average bootlegger wouldn't even find the right headblock for a tape within a couple of days, let alone knowing how to install it and how to calibrate a Studer to play back the tape etc...
By the way, I'm sure the Estate has already spent millions of dollars on digitising, companies like Iron Mountain can charge many thousands for professionally transferring just one reel.
.
That's one of the reasons I always said that it will take many-many years for the Estate to archive everything, whenever someone suggested that they might already have done with transferring everything years ago. No way. I also find it hard to believe that they have reached 45% by now. Maybe 45% of audio, but if we include all the film and video material too, I find that hard to believe. There's just sooooo much material and transferring them takes a lot of time, it's certainly not a matter of just putting up a reel and pressing play.

mattosgood said:

Kares said:

psyche2 said:

Of course, and due respect to true professionals. But lend the Vault keys to a bootlegger for a couple of days and I'd be happy for the next dacade.

.

The average bootlegger wouldn't even find the right headblock for a tape within a couple of days, let alone knowing how to install it and how to calibrate a Studer to play back the tape etc...
By the way, I'm sure the Estate has already spent millions of dollars on digitising, companies like Iron Mountain can charge many thousands for professionally transferring just one reel.
.
That's one of the reasons I always said that it will take many-many years for the Estate to archive everything, whenever someone suggested that they might already have done with transferring everything years ago. No way. I also find it hard to believe that they have reached 45% by now. Maybe 45% of audio, but if we include all the film and video material too, I find that hard to believe. There's just sooooo much material and transferring them takes a lot of time, it's certainly not a matter of just putting up a reel and pressing play.

.
Speaking of Iron Mountain: knowing the time it takes to archive everything, I'm worried about an issue that plagues all massive archives of this kind, and that is: over time, things get lost inside them. I don't mean stolen, I mean lost and cannot be found anymore.
.
It is because the filing system they use is pretty simple and dumb: every artefact is placed in a container with a unique ID (barcode), and that container barcode gets logged in the system together with its contents. So if you search for (let's say) Charlie Chaplin's shoes, the system will tell you it is in the container "X8252FADT42GD" (or whatever) and you'll find that container in Room X, aisle 34, row3 etc.
.
IF (and that is a big IF) the person who last handled those shoes put them back in the right container. If not, the shoes end up in a totally different container in a totally different location inside the archive, and as there is no record of its new location, they will never be found again. (Or if someone do come across them by chance, they won't know what they are and where they belong.)
.

And as most artefacts inside the archive are NOT grouped by artist or copyright owner or whatever, but mixed up sometimes totally randomly, the consequences of misplacing something by accident can be fatal.

.
I'm only hoping that the Prince archive is at least more-or-less physically held together inside the warehouse, and not scattered all over the different locations, but even if so, there can be a ton of recordings that are unmarked on the boxes, and once those are misplaced, possibly no-one will ever put them on a tape recorder to check what they might contain.

Kares said:

psyche2 said:

Of course, and due respect to true professionals. But lend the Vault keys to a bootlegger for a couple of days and I'd be happy for the next dacade.

.

The average bootlegger wouldn't even find the right headblock for a tape within a couple of days, let alone knowing how to install it and how to calibrate a Studer to play back the tape etc...
By the way, I'm sure the Estate has already spent millions of dollars on digitising, companies like Iron Mountain can charge many thousands for professionally transferring just one reel.
.
That's one of the reasons I always said that it will take many-many years for the Estate to archive everything, whenever someone suggested that they might already have done with transferring everything years ago. No way. I also find it hard to believe that they have reached 45% by now. Maybe 45% of audio, but if we include all the film and video material too, I find that hard to believe. There's just sooooo much material and transferring them takes a lot of time, it's certainly not a matter of just putting up a reel and pressing play.

Just curious. How much time does it take 2 digitize 1 6 minute song?

FrankieCoco1 said:

mattosgood said:

any proof of that?

@Mattsogood Fair play for writing a book and all that but it seems like you have an agenda to support this estate no matter what the facts are showing. Are you angling for the archiving job with them or something? To be honest it mightn’t be a bad idea cos you seem to care.

LOL - now that would be a dream job but I think the commute from the UK would be too hard on my 55 year old body!

And no, I'm just sharing IMHO how I saw it having witnissed the Q&A 1st hand and had a chance to speak 121 with the sony marketing guy and Charles Spicer afterwards.

I went in very sceptical, as I think many others did but what perhaps doesn't come across in the @TPS report is their tone and passion during the session.Check with anyone else you know that was there and I'm pretty sure they'd say the same.

They know us ultra fans are p*ssed. They are too, having to build bridges that Prince had burned and get out of bad deals signed by the previous adminstrators.

The only agenda I have is for the facts, no spin or making sh*t up, which seems to be happening a lot - an example being, the so-called negativity towards Social Media profiles like The Violet Reality - what was said in good humour and the room laughed. We all have the right to be sceptical as proof is in the pudding but making things up and not dealing with the known knowns and known unknowns helps no one. As to my book, thanks, but it's not connected to any of this.

[Edited 6/11/25 19:10pm]

Gooddoctor23 said:

Kares said:

.

The average bootlegger wouldn't even find the right headblock for a tape within a couple of days, let alone knowing how to install it and how to calibrate a Studer to play back the tape etc...
By the way, I'm sure the Estate has already spent millions of dollars on digitising, companies like Iron Mountain can charge many thousands for professionally transferring just one reel.
.
That's one of the reasons I always said that it will take many-many years for the Estate to archive everything, whenever someone suggested that they might already have done with transferring everything years ago. No way. I also find it hard to believe that they have reached 45% by now. Maybe 45% of audio, but if we include all the film and video material too, I find that hard to believe. There's just sooooo much material and transferring them takes a lot of time, it's certainly not a matter of just putting up a reel and pressing play.

Just curious. How much time does it take 2 digitize 1 6 minute song?

.
I can't give you an average as it greatly depends on the condition of the tape (if it needs 'baking' that can take as long as 24 hrs) and of course you need to have the right tape machine with the right head block (for example, a 1" analog tape can contain 1 track mono, 2 track stereo, or 4-track, 8-track recordings), you need to check speed and eq calibration of the machine, you need to regularly clean the tape path of the machine etc etc - and of course once everything's in order, you'll play (and transfer) the tape in real time. (A regular 2" multitrack tape reel that Prince used at 30ips tape speed can hold approx. 16 minutes of recording. Occasinally he switched to 15ips to be able to record up to 32 mins continously, like when he taped America.)

.

So if there's only one person working on it, it can take literally ages. Ideally there should be a team, working continously, examining tape condition, baking, sorting reels by recording format so they'd know in advance, which tape machine and what head block will be needed for playback, trying to work out a workflow that can handle several reels at once. But I'm not sure if they have a team... It'd be nice to get some inside info on how they actually work.
.

Kares said:

psyche2 said:

Of course, and due respect to true professionals. But lend the Vault keys to a bootlegger for a couple of days and I'd be happy for the next dacade.

.

The average bootlegger wouldn't even find the right headblock for a tape within a couple of days, let alone knowing how to install it and how to calibrate a Studer to play back the tape etc...
By the way, I'm sure the Estate has already spent millions of dollars on digitising, companies like Iron Mountain can charge many thousands for professionally transferring just one reel.
.
That's one of the reasons I always said that it will take many-many years for the Estate to archive everything, whenever someone suggested that they might already have done with transferring everything years ago. No way. I also find it hard to believe that they have reached 45% by now. Maybe 45% of audio, but if we include all the film and video material too, I find that hard to believe. There's just sooooo much material and transferring them takes a lot of time, it's certainly not a matter of just putting up a reel and pressing play.

Kares said:

Gooddoctor23 said:

Just curious. How much time does it take 2 digitize 1 6 minute song?

.
I can't give you an average as it greatly depends on the condition of the tape (if it needs 'baking' that can take as long as 24 hrs) and of course you need to have the right tape machine with the right head block (for example, a 1" analog tape can contain 1 track mono, 2 track stereo, or 4-track, 8-track recordings), you need to check speed and eq calibration of the machine, you need to regularly clean the tape path of the machine etc etc - and of course once everything's in order, you'll play (and transfer) the tape in real time. (A regular 2" multitrack tape reel that Prince used at 30ips tape speed can hold approx. 16 minutes of recording. Occasinally he switched to 15ips to be able to record up to 32 mins continously, like when he taped America.)

.

So if there's only one person working on it, it can take literally ages. Ideally there should be a team, working continously, examining tape condition, baking, sorting reels by recording format so they'd know in advance, which tape machine and what head block will be needed for playback, trying to work out a workflow that can handle several reels at once. But I'm not sure if they have a team... It'd be nice to get some inside info on how they actually work.
.

Makes sense.

Thanks.

Kares said:

So if there's only one person working on it, it can take literally ages. Ideally there should be a team, working continously, examining tape condition, baking, sorting reels by recording format so they'd know in advance, which tape machine and what head block will be needed for playback, trying to work out a workflow that can handle several reels at once. But I'm not sure if they have a team... It'd be nice to get some inside info on how they actually work.
.

.

There was a team back in 2018 at least: https://lefsetz.com/wordp...ces-vault/

.

I also recall Michael Howe talking about how his job was basically to go to Iron Mountain each day and listen to new Prince music.

bizzie said:

Kares said:

So if there's only one person working on it, it can take literally ages. Ideally there should be a team, working continously, examining tape condition, baking, sorting reels by recording format so they'd know in advance, which tape machine and what head block will be needed for playback, trying to work out a workflow that can handle several reels at once. But I'm not sure if they have a team... It'd be nice to get some inside info on how they actually work.
.

.

There was a team back in 2018 at least: https://lefsetz.com/wordp...ces-vault/

.

I also recall Michael Howe talking about how his job was basically to go to Iron Mountain each day and listen to new Prince music.

.
Yes, thanks, I remember these, but we don't know the current situation, and a 'team' can mean anything from 2 people, even when only one of them is doing the actual technical job and the other is a curator. (I don't think Howe was handling the tapes and machines.)

mattosgood said:

The only '45% digitized' sounds like an overall impressive volume of material, but in all likelyhood, and looking in detail at files named in the PP photos, will be live video and uneddited video reels. Much of which may never be of releasable quality.

Michael Howe, made it clear they scoured the tapes for particular recordings. I don't think the remaining 55% is going to deliver an treasure trove of unknown recordings.

SquirrelMeat said:

The only '45% digitized' sounds like an overall impressive volume of material, but in all likelyhood, and looking in detail at files named in the PP photos, will be live video and uneddited video reels. Much of which may never be of releasable quality.

Michael Howe, made it clear they scoured the tapes for particular recordings. I don't think the remaining 55% is going to deliver an treasure trove of unknown recordings.

There was more than one vault. Some may have been outside Minnesota or the United States.

fredmagnus said:

johnpiex said:

They were asked years ago about a PR 40 project, of which they confirmed their intentions to do so. And now they are no longer even talking about it. So until we get some release dates, they’re just “Talkin’ Loud And Sayin’ Nothing.”

Exactly.

Remember the "signature PR40 project" they promised 2 years ago.

.

For now, there is nothing concrete.

As usual.

I will say they seem to be listening to us somewhat. There were people like me, I must admit, who were poo-pooing the idea of another Purple Rain project. Doesn't mean I didn't want anything else. It just makes more sense for the 50th anniversary with more distance from the previous iteration.

mattosgood said:

FrankieCoco1 said:

mattosgood said:

LOL - now that would be a dream job but I think the commute from the UK would be too hard on my 55 year old body!

And no, I'm just sharing IMHO how I saw it having witnissed the Q&A 1st hand and had a chance to speak 121 with the sony marketing guy and Charles Spicer afterwards.

I went in very sceptical, as I think many others did but what perhaps doesn't come across in the @TPS report is their tone and passion during the session.Check with anyone else you know that was there and I'm pretty sure they'd say the same.

They know us ultra fans are p*ssed. They are too, having to build bridges that Prince had burned and get out of bad deals signed by the previous adminstrators.

The only agenda I have is for the facts, no spin or making sh*t up, which seems to be happening a lot - an example being, the so-called negativity towards Social Media profiles like The Violet Reality - what was said in good humour and the room laughed. We all have the right to be sceptical as proof is in the pudding but making things up and not dealing with the known knowns and known unknowns helps no one. As to my book, thanks, but it's not connected to any of this.

[Edited 6/11/25 19:10pm]

Thanks for the honest reply and enlightening us about the ‘vibes’ of the event, which not always easy to get across just in written words. Perhaps Bizzie’s idea of having the panels available to view/streamed, perhaps at a later date would help and generate intrigue - something for future celebrations.

I think that would be a great idea - get everyone up to speed on what they said, the vibe in the room and the questions they were asked by the fams that were there - which took up nearly half of the session and isn't covered in the @TPS report