Prince’s estate has announced that a four-day event will be held in April 2018 to commemorate the second anniversary of the rock star’s death. The highlight of this event is a concert that will be held on April 21 featuring material that has never before been released or seen by members of the general public.
The concert is going to be named Prince: Live on the Big Screen and will take place at the Target Center in Minneapolis. It will feature video footage of Prince on the big screen and a live band of musicians who have collaborated with Prince in the past. There will also be some ‘very special guests’ that have yet to be announced. Video of Prince has been released by his estate which has not been seen before and without this footage, the concert would not have been able to go ahead. Tickets for this concert go on sale on January 20 from 10 am and they can be purchased at the box office at the Target Center. Tickets are expected to sell out quickly and the demand for the tickets will almost certainly be greater than the number of tickets that will go on sale.
Although this is the first time a video of Prince has been used in this way, his estate had released concert footage before. Sign O’The Times was one of the most popular concerts that Prince ever performed but footage was extremely rare and had been out of print for some time. However, this was uncovered and shown on Showtime last year.
Prince was a very popular artist when he was alive but interest in his career has risen considerably since his death. His recording studio, Paisley Park, is now owned by his estate and they have held a series of events since his death to celebrate his life. An exhibition was held in London in October last year and some of the items that were displayed in this exhibition was provided by Paisley Park. In the same month a photo book was released containing images of the star. The book was entitled Prince: A Private View and contained a foreword written by Beyoncé.
Paisley Park held a battle of the bands competition in Prince’s memory to find and support new musical talent. The prize for the winner of the competition was some mentoring sessions from members of New Power Generation, the band that played with Prince for many years.
There are still legal issues that are ongoing with the Prince estate which is in the background of all the other work that they are doing. The main issue is surrounding who actually has the rights to material released by Prince prior to 1996. At the time of his death, Prince was signed to Universal Music and they believed that they held the distribution rights to all his music. However, a judge in Minnesota ruled that the rights to all his music released before 1996 actually belonged to his previous record label Warner Bros and that they would continue to do so until 2021.
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