Prince’s Estate unveils plans for posthumous releases

Two years after the sudden death of Prince, the rock icon’s estate and label have announced a slew of new releases from the artist.

On the April 21st anniversary of his death, Prince’s label released a video for Nothing Compares 2 U. This was the first time the artist’s only studio recording of the song has ever been publicly released.

Watch Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U video:

Since this release, the estate has launched two new websites – the retrospective Prince Discography annotated, and the fan focussed Prince2Me.

Today they announced the September 28 release of a new album from the artist. The unreleased music is supposedly not a compilation, but a set of songs created at the same time.

The CEO of Atom Factory – overseers of The Prince Estate, Troy Carter told Variety “Michael Howe, who’s been working with us on the archive, has done a tremendous job of finding some special pieces of work. One of the pieces that he found, all of us fell in love with and decided this was special enough for fans to hear. So we’re putting the final touches on it—it’ll come in the fall.”

There are also plans for the release of a Prince memoir at the end of the year. The artist delivered 50 pages of handwritten work to a publisher before his death in 2016.

Posthumous releases of artist’s greatest hits, or collections of demos throughout the years have always been common. Prince’s estate however is covering new ground with these new sites, and the promise of an album which was recorded to be released as such before the artist’s death.

This isn’t unexpected considering the artist’s release patterns in the past. The artist was known for thinking outside the box more often than not.

Whilst details on the release are still scarce, the promise of new music from the groundbreaking artist is incredibly exciting for fans around the world.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.