Rare copy of Prince’s lost Black Album smashes Discogs’ highest sale record

Originally published FACT

“It simply shouldn’t exist,” says the site.

Exactly one month after a David Bowie oddity broke the record for most expensive sale on Discogs, a mythically rare release from Prince has smashed it in a sale that likely won’t be topped for a long time.

Famously shelved a week before its intended 1987 release, Prince’s The Black Album evolved into a bootleg of SMiLE proportions. Though the millions of pressed copies of the album were destroyed, an extremely slim number of DJ promos survived (though even most of those were recalled). Now, one of those copies has sold on Discogs for $15,000 — more than the last several record holders combined.

Originally titled The Funk Bible, the album was intended to be the follow-up to Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times before its recall.

The darker record was meant to be a rejection of the increasingly pop direction Prince felt pulled in, but was replaced by the considerably more accessible (and still excellent) LoveSexy. The only track that survived the crossover between albums was ‘When 2 R In Love’.

The original promos had no printed title, artist name, production credits or photography thus earning its nickname which eventually became Prince canon when Warner Bros. put out an extremely limited release of it in 1994 for copyright purposes.

Learn more about the sale in Discogs’ latest blog post.