Prince Estate Settles Feud With Tidal, New Album Coming in 2019
The Prince Estate and Tidal have ended their lengthy legal battle over the streaming rights to the late music icon’s discography. On Friday (May 11), Tidal announced that they will debut a new Prince album in 2019.
According to a press release (via PR Newswire), the new Prince album will feature previously unreleased music from the Purple One’s vault at Paisley Park. Tidal will stream and have the project available for download exclusively for 14 days before releasing physical copies of the album worldwide.
"Our only goal is to share Prince's music with his fans as he wanted," said JAY-Z, who is the owner of Tidal. "After thoughtful and honest conversation with him, he chose Tidal as his partner for HITnRUN Phase One and HITnRUN Phase Two, and we will continue to respect and honor Prince's enduring legacy and wishes with this new collection."
Troy Carter, speaking on behalf of The Prince Estate, concurred and said, "I'm very pleased this is resolved, and we get to honor the relationship between Prince and TIDAL with this album. We look forward to fans hearing the new music and experiencing the genius of Prince."
The agreement between Tidal and The Prince Estate was approved last Wednesday (May 9). However, the album partnership with TIDAL does not involve any of Prince's music catalog, which is under prior agreements with Warner Brothers Records.
The legal battle between Tidal and the Prince estate stretches back to November 2016, when the streaming platform sued the estate over the streaming rights of the late artist's catalog. Executors of the Prince estate questioned the validity of the musician's agreement with Tidal.
JAY-Z talked about his legal battle with the Prince Estate on "Caught In their Eyes" from his Grammy-nominated album, 4:44.
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