I was digging through my Spotify account and discovered a playlist of Prince covers that I once made. It contains a little over 20 hours of music by various artists reinterpreting songs originally written and performed by Prince.

I thought that some of you might find the collection useful or interesting, especially now that the originals are no longer available on Spotify.

Here's the link: https://open.spotify.com/...pvBCjVYXbH

It's not complete by any means, so feel free to suggest additions. I think I have left out the most blatant karaoke tracks, but there are instrumental versions and such and the artistic quality varies quite a bit.

I highly recommend listening in shuffle mode, as you may otherwise end up with four straight hours of Purple Rain covers.

i had no idea that there were so many

how many of these are authorized???

luvsexy4all said:

vili said:

luvsexy4all said:

how many of these are authorized???

I have no idea, but my guess is that if by "authorized" you mean "with approval from Prince", the number is quite close to (but not quite) zero, while if you mean "with proper licensing carried out", the answer is probably "all of them", or close to it. My understanding is that it isn't too much hassle to deal with what's called mechanical licensing when covering songs.

he must cringe at most of these

Hey, it looks like all the songs on the playlist got removed from Spotify. I assume that my posting about this alerted Prince's team to the existence of these cover tracks.

Here's a pro tip, Prince's team: if you search Spotify for specific song titles, you'll find more stuff to ban. My list was by no means comprehensive. Go wild!

marksinclair said:

Do you think Spotify are just doing anything it takes to comply with prince's lawyers? I'm surprised they took down album tracks by TLC, the romeo and juliet version of when doves cry etc. Does prince have the right to withdraw these from other artist albums/compilations?

I am not a music copyright lawyer and I have no idea what is going on in the Prince camp. I also don't know how licensing for streaming works.

With that said, Prince certainly has the songwriter's copyright to those songs, so that may give him some say over streaming which to my understanding involves two copyrights: songwriting and performance. In other types of licensing you would need permission from both copyright owners to use a work in a specific way. Whether it is true here, I don't know.

Furthermore, if Prince has consolidated all of his rights under the newly created NPG Music Publishing venture, he probably has much more say over these things than he would if he still had his licensing taken care of by the traditional channels like ASCAP.

So I suppose it is entirely possible that he can legally prevent cover songs from being streamed.

But again, I am really talking out of my arse here.