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Music

What Should We Do with an Artist’s Music After They Die?

We continue to pry open, quite literally in Prince’s case, the private works of artists to feast on their off-cuts – but is this fair?

No one wants to think about their own death. If they do, they're probably artists, and they tend to do so in an abstract, poetic kind of way, rather than an "I should probably file paperwork confirming the administrator of my estate and intellectual property" way. Which is perhaps why, when Prince died suddenly at the age of 57 last year, he didn't have even the semblance of a will.

With his death, then, came months of legal complications and hearings over who should manage his estate. And because the stakes were so unusually high, the eyes of the world looked on eagerly as the mess was slowly picked apart like a ball of tangled iPhone headphone cords. Would the silver lining of Prince's untimely end, his fans wondered, be the unveiling of the contents of his infamous vaults?

Read the rest over on Noisey.