Starting on Sunday Feb. 12, Prince’s music will be available for streaming online.
Not only will albums from his entire career, including 1999 and Purple Rain, but also hundreds of unreleased songs. The news was first broken by Napster that it would stream the pop star’s music. Spotify stated that it would follow suit, as well as Amazon Music and iHeartRadio. Although they have yet to make an official announcement, it is expected that Apple Music would have the same content.
Before his death in tragic April of 2015, Prince was a fierce opponent of online music. He was known for taking down videos of his music on YouTube and other video sharing sites. That same year he removed his entire music catalog from all streaming services except for Tidal. The presence of his music online was even the subject of a court case, Lenz v. Universal, which sued Universal Music on behalf of a mom whose toddler was seen in a YouTube video dancing to the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy.”
Conversely, Prince was also an innovator in online music when he created the services himself. For example, in 2007, he created his own online music distribution system called NPG Music Club on his official website, which even won a Webby award.
Acquiring this streaming deal was important for the Prince estate to emerge from debt, because while it was worth $200 million, it also owed $100 million at the same time so it will help offset some of those costs.