TrivialPursuit said:

What if the estate did anything worth while?

Than the could be succesful and bring Prince to the bigger masses, I guess they don't want that and want Prince to stay 'Teh Purple Rain singer' and only be known as a local MPLS folk singer or something.

databank said:

JorisE73 said:

Remember that the Estate has two suits in charge that have no clue about real music, one is the owner of Source magazine, so he's not to be taken seriously.
There only concern is making money so having a obscure indie artist or real musician who doesn't sell anyhow will not be on there radar and they'll always choose those cxommercial clowns/frauds like Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and the like.

Yeah but I wasn't necessarily suggesting they do that.

Since we were in a hypothetical scenario, my point wasn't to assume for the worst, but for the best

Yeah, I understand your point , but I thnk the Estate would rather go for the easy money and have some big comercial acts/products that sell to the big deaf crowds who don't care for music instead of take a risk with true artists who only sell to there small niche audience but understand music as a artform and take it seriously like prince did.

JorisE73 said:

databank said:

Yeah but I wasn't necessarily suggesting they do that.

Since we were in a hypothetical scenario, my point wasn't to assume for the worst, but for the best

Yeah, I understand your point , but I thnk the Estate would rather go for the easy money and have some big comercial acts/products that sell to the big deaf crowds who don't care for music instead of take a risk with true artists who only sell to there small niche audience but understand music as a artform and take it seriously like prince did.

Admitedly, your point illustrates what we can assume the Estate's perspective currently is: using Prince's legacy as a big money machine with little care to documenting his artistry. I mean I realize I'm not in their head, but what we see and what we hear suggests that more than anything else.

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TBH their perspective sadly fits both Prince's in his lifetime and most of his fandom's.

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For reasons of ego and, perhaps more importantly, wealth, Prince seemed to always be divided between a desire to become a true indie artist who just does what he wants for a smaller, yet faithful fanbase, and the necessity to maintain his status as a huge arena-filler superstar.

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And from what I can tell out of 25 years on the Org, a good percentage of his fans only understood music in terms of commercial success, sales and popularity, mostly only listening to other superstars and paying little attention to "smaller" artists and niche markets.

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It's a sad "all or nothing" approach, because (to take an 80s/90s perspective that isn't valid today in terms of numbers, but can be transposed to whatever the measures for success are today) it means that either you're selling 20M copies of each album OR you're a complete failure as an artist. Back in the late 80s or 90s, Prince, WB and the fans all considered that selling 3,5M copies of an album was a failure, when in fact, a large majority of professional musicians who DID make a decent living and DID have a career and a fanbase could only dream of selling such numbers. The loss of perspective was/is appalling.

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So IDK, I guess my dream was to have an Estate that had an academic approach as much as as a commercial one, but clearly, this isn't the case and I probably won't live to see it. better make peace with it and move on if you ask me. If they Estate ever changes owners, we'll see... Until then, I don't see any change on the horizon.