On Tuesday, Prince's sister, Tyka Nelson, filed court documents saying the music icon died without leaving a will. The legal paperwork raised questions about the fate of Prince's estate, which includes his famous "vault" of never-before-heard music. Along with Nelson, Prince's only surviving full sibling, the filing also named five half-sibling as heirs. As The New York Times reports, half-siblings are the same as full siblings under Minnesota law, so the stage may be set for an extended bummer of a family feud.
The uncertainty around Prince's business affairs after his death last week at age 57 is all the more remarkable considering his career was marked by constant battles for creative (and financial) control. What's at stake is no small sum: Forbes Magazine's last annual estimate of Prince's annual pre-tax earnings, in 2005, was $49.7 million. And he has sold more than 650,000 albums and 2.8 million tracks in the U.S. alone since his passing, according to Nielsen data cited by the Times.
Today, a suburban Minneapolis judge agreed that Prince had no will and, as his sister requested, appointed an affiliate of Minnesota-based Bremer Bank as "special administrator" for Prince's estate. For a sense of what that means and what the future may hold for the Purple Rain legend's music, Pitchfork spoke today with Phillips Nizer partner Monica McCabe, an entertainment and intellectual property lawyer who previously represented Prince. As administrator of the estate, she says, "the bank may have control of Prince's assets"—among them, that trove of unreleased records.
Pitchfork: Tell me about your work with Prince.
Monica McCabe: I worked some time ago on a couple of litigation matters, the most interesting of which was a dispute over his symbol-shaped guitar. There was a plaintiff who claimed that he had designed a model of the guitar and dropped it off at a concert and that Prince had copied it. We were able to get that dismissed. There were also some seizures we did with the U.S. Marshals' office for counterfeiting goods outside his concerts.
Pitchfork: How could someone so fiercely protective of his intellectual property not have a will?
McCabe: You're right, he sought a lot of control over his works. His whole dispute with his record company years ago was just about that—control over his musical creations. It could be any number of things. A lot of people don't want to deal with the fact that they're going to die some day, so they just put it off or don't deal with it all. It's interesting, because he had so much unpublished work that you would think he would have wanted to have some kind of control over that.
Pitchfork: What is a special administrator of an estate?
McCabe: It's kind of like an executor. If you were to have a will, the executor is the person who runs everything, who controls everything, makes decisions about—let's say you had a piece of real estate you might want to sell. The administrator, or the executor, is the one who makes those decisions.
Pitchfork: So if this bank that Prince has been working with over the years is named the administrator, then it can make those decisions, basically?
McCabe: Right. It would have to seek the permission of the other people inheriting. But they're the ones that execute on the decisions.
Pitchfork: What does all this mean for people who want to hear more Prince music—especially, as you alluded to earlier, from his vault?
McCabe: It's probably going to take a while to sort out. If they all become joint owners of the copyrighted works, and there's no agreement among them, then any one of them could exploit the work if they don't destroy it. But they have to account back to their other joint owners of the work. It could be messy unless they form some kind of trust or organization for dealing with the unpublished works—well, all the works, really.
Pitchfork: How does this compare with, say, the Jimi Hendrix estate, which you've done litigation on, or the Michael Jackson estate, which has been in the news these past several years?
McCabe: With Jimi Hendrix, there was so much fighting among the heirs that it took years and years to get resolved. And pieces of it were divided up. Hopefully that's not going to happen, but that's a possibility. I wonder: If there wasn't a will, if there were some kind of instructions that went with the unpublished works. I don't know, but that's another possibility that the heirs could choose to follow or not follow.
Pitchfork: Just to back up, you mention that any one of them could exploit the work if they don't destroy it. So potentially you could have one half-sibling saying, "OK, I'm going to license this to this movie," and another half-sibling, "OK, I'm going to put this on this CD..."? Or what does that really mean?
McCabe: If they become joint owners, let's just say they made $100,000, then the profits would be split among all of the owners. You see issues like that with the [Bob] Marley estate, too. Typically the best thing for the joint owners to do is to have an agreement, to say we're not going to exploit this work unless both of us agree. But in the absence of such an agreement, then either owner could exploit it, unless there's some kind of trust formed that would hold the works or some kind of entity.
Pitchfork: You said this could take a long time. How long? I guess you said Hendrix took a long time.
McCabe: Oh yeah, they took years. It just depends on a lot of things. With so many people, it's possible that it's going to take at least several years.
Find more on Prince and his legacy here.