Prince cannot rest in peace, even in his grave: less than eight years after the death of the Purple Rain artist, his heirs are back in court arguing with each other in the latest episode of a long legal battle over control of the vast legacy of the Minneapolis singer. The lawsuit filed in a Delaware court pits two former collaborators against four of Prince's relatives for control of Prince Legacy LLC, one of the two entities created in 2022 to manage the $156 million inheritance. Primary Wave Music, which holds the other half, is not involved in the dispute that Billboard reported.
The lawsuit
Prince died in 2016 from an opioid overdose without leaving a will: a tragic irony for an artist who had fought tenaciously for control of his music in life. The uncertainty of the situation opened a Pandora's box of legal disputes that seemed to have been settled Solomonically in the summer of 2022 with a 50/50 split of the inheritance. It was not so: now L. Londell McMillan, who was briefly Prince's manager in the 90s, and Charles Spicer have sued four relatives - half-sisters Sharon Nelson and Norrine Nelson, niece Breanna Nelson and nephew Allen Nelson - who, they say, are trying to oust them from the company, violating a previous agreement and causing enormous damage to the efforts to "preserve and protect Prince's legacy".
The shares
The two claim that the half-sisters would have tried to sell their shares to Primary Wave, thus unbalancing the current equal division between the two entities. McMillan and Spicer assert that the Nelsons "lack any business and management skills and have no experience in the music industry or in negotiating high-level deals in this sector". The two former collaborators therefore fear "irreparable damage" to the company's relationships and revenues, not to mention the fact that "the interference and intervention of the Nelsons is making it impossible to carry out the mandate of Prince Legacy".
The music
Meanwhile, Prince's music continues to be a money-making machine: in November, a month after the release of the deluxe box set of Diamond and Pearls with a vast collection of unreleased 'from the vault', the singer's wardrobe went up for auction, whose creations are becoming a musical for the stage. A few days ago, producer Orin Wolf announced a new theatrical version of Purple Rain, the 1984 autobiographical film that made Prince a megastar and won him the Oscar for best original song.
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