TIDAL and Prince estate settle legal dispute, new album on its way

The long running dispute between Prince’s estate and JAY-Z’s TIDAL streaming service is over – and TIDAL will be releasing a post-humous album next year which will be compiled by JAY-Z.

The latter is, along with the estate, picking out “previously unreleased music sourced from Prince’s vast archive of vault recordings.”

The album will first stream exclusively on TIDAL for 14 days and a download will be available seven days after its debut.

A physical release will follow thereafter from the Prince estate.

“Our only goal is to share Prince’s music with his fans as he wanted,” Jay-Z said

“After [a] 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.”

Two years ago, when Prince’s previous executors struck a new global agreement with the superstar’s former record company Warner Bros Records to release new records, they had to contend with a verbal deal that Prince had struck with TIDAL.

At that time, Prince records through Warner Bros had scanned 14.3 million in the US alone.

The estate was obviously eager to keep generating revenues.

It needed to resolve the nebulous deal Prince struck with TIDAL a month before his death.

It was unclear whether the HITnRUN albums were exclusive to TIDAL for just the first month, or forever, and if that deal included his entire back catalogue, which Tidal claimed.

The estate charged TIDAL with streaming Prince content illegally, and demanded specific documents be shown.

TIDAL refused, saying these documents were confidential.

In any case, the previous executor has gone, and replaced in April 2017 by Troy Carter who was brought in as “entertainment advisor”.

Carter managed Lady Gaga and Meghan Trainor, was CEO of the Atom Factory and was a vice president at Spotify.

He seems to have brokered an end to the dispute.

At the announcement of the TIDAL agreement, Carter said, “I’m very pleased this is resolved and we get to honour 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 Prince estate makes it clear that its settlement with TIDAL “does not involve any of Prince’s music catalogue that is subject to prior agreements with Warner Brothers Records.”

It seems Warner Bros is also working on a new Prince album, to be released as early as this September.