When the 57-year-old passed last Friday, his net worth was estimated to be $300 million, and that doesn’t include the money his estate is set to make from the surge in sales following his death.
According to BuzzAngle Music, 230,000 albums and one million singles from Prince’s catalogue were purchased in the United States the day he died, with that figure still growing.
On top of that, the musician’s catalogue of music is estimated to be worth over $500 million. Unlike other artists, Prince owned most of his master recordings and music publishing.
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He also left behind a vault full of unreleased music. The vault, located in the basement of his Paisley Park mansion, is said to hold enough unpublished music to fill 26 albums. It’s also reported an unreleased album with Miles Davis may be included.
“I’ve vaulted so much stuff, going way back to the ’80s, because I didn’t want people to hear it — it wasn’t ready,” he told the New York Post in 2015.
“One day I’ll go back and finish it, and it’ll feel like no time has passed. To me, time folds back on itself.”
While it’s unclear if the icon ever made a will before his death last week, given how meticulous he was at ensuring ownership of his music, it would be surprising if he hadn’t.
“Hopefully, Prince executed a trust and indicated his intentions, both with respect to who his trustee would be and how he would want the estate to be disposed of,” celebrity lawyer Dan Streisand told Reuters.
“Prince was an incredibly smart person, he had great legal representation … so I would suspect that somebody along the way said, ‘Look, we’ve got to get you to execute some documents.’”
But if the singer didn’t make a will, inheritance will fall to his closest living relative. Under Minnesota law, if an unmarried person with no children dies without a will, the estate first falls to grandchildren, then parents and siblings.
In 1996, his first wife Mayte Garcia gave birth to Prince’s only son, named Boy Gregory, but he was born with the rare genetic disorder Pfeiffer syndrome and died a week later. After divorcing Garcia in 1999, he married his second wife Manuela Testolini in 2001 but divorced in 2006.
Both of Prince’s parents have been dead for decades, and while he has several half-siblings, his only full-blooded sibling is his 55-year-old sister Tyka Nelson. Nelson, a former drug addict, was photographed at her brother’s mansion last Friday with purple hair, telling hundreds of gathered fans, “He loved you back”.
While she became close to her brother in recent years, it followed a difficult stretch where Nelson lived in a crack house and prostituted herself to support her two sons.
“I was a single mother and my boys were babies,” she told the National Enquirer in 2003. “I sold my body for food, money and Pampers. I pawned the car Prince had given me and sold the kids’ TV for drugs.”
Along with the reports that Nelson could receive all or part of her brother’s fortune, there is also speculation Prince may have left some of his millions to Jehovah’s Witnesses, which he joined in 2001.
As both the money and speculation continue to swirl, it’s unlikely the icon left without a plan.
“He just never wanted to be taken advantage of,” lawyer L. Lee Phillips, who worked with Prince for over a decade, told Bloomberg. “Certainly, he is going to leave somewhat of a legacy, artists standing up for themselves — but not as strong as his legacy performing and playing.”
With the New York Post.
This article was originally published on news.com.au