A copy of Prince’s The Black Album has just sold on Discogs for a huge $27,500.
The production copy from the original 1987 Canadian pressing broke the record for the most expensive purchase ever made on the online music marketplace.
Prince has held the record for the most expensive purchase on Discogs since 2016, with a US copy of The Black Album going for $15,000.
The 1987 LP was recorded as a follow up to Sign O’ The Times, but wasn’t released until seven years later in 1994.
Prince ordered the Warner Bros. label to scrap every production copy in existence after a so-called personal epiphany about the caliber of content he really wanted to put out to the world.
“I suddenly realised that we can die at any moment, and we’d be judged by the last thing we left behind. I didn’t want that angry, bitter thing to be the last thing.”
This meant out of the 500,000 retail versions of the iconic Prince album, there are only a handful of promotional vinyl copies in existence.
This particular LP belonged to an ex-employee of a record pressing plant in Toronto and was sold on his behalf by Grammy award-winning art director and music memorabilia collector Jeff Gold.
“There are few artists as collectible as Prince, and The Black Album is one of the most valuable records in the world.”
Although promotional copies of the LP, originally styled as The Funk Bible, are rare in the US, there are no other known Canadian production copies in existence.
The Black Album was said to be sold in a plain black sleeve with no adorning features aside from the catalogue number.
In press releases from the ’80s, the album was described as dark, murky, and lyrically malicious. Following his supposed MDMA-related epiphany, Prince deemed the LP ‘evil’ and asked his label to scrap all existing copies.
Via Resident Advisor.
