Credit: Far Out / Allen Beaulieu
Wed 23 September 2026 14:30, UK
Prince never needed anyone questioning him on whether he could make a great record.
Some of the greatest music to ever come out of the pop realm was his handiwork, even when he wasn’t making the biggest chart hits or anything, but he also felt that some people seemed to be getting far more attention than they should have whenever they made one of their records.
Then again, a lot of that bitterness can only come from when you’ve been jerked around one too many times by the industry. Prince already had a harsh climb up to the top after getting a thrashing from Rolling Stones fans, and despite his need to carry on and make better music after the fact, it’s not like he was willing to roll over and let the rest of his record label walk all over him day after day.
He wanted to be in charge of his own destiny, and that often meant working to make sure that his contract was exactly what he wanted. He knew how to play the game, and when he tried to get played for a fool during his dispute with Warner Bros, he was going to do everything he could to cheat the system in whatever way he knew how. Writing ‘slave’ on his cheek was one thing, but it was all about him trying to speedrun his way through his contract.
The amount of music that he wanted to create didn’t fall in line with what the label wanted, but it also had to do with the attention that ‘The Purple One’ was getting. He was always in a heated battle with Michael Jackson to become one of the greatest pop stars the world had ever seen, but when looking at all the effort he was putting into things, Prince was pissed when he found out that a lot of the earnings were going towards funding people like Madonna during her prime.
Granted, you can’t really blame the label here, either. Madonna was one of the biggest stars in the world, and since she’s sold upwards of 400million records, it’s not like anyone was going to touch her kind of sales. But despite changing his name and claiming that his beef was with Warner Bros, Prince would have been lying if he said that there wasn’t a little bit of resentment towards Madonna in there as well.
He felt that the label wasn’t giving him the payments that he really deserved, and there was no way he was going to just accept the fact that she was making more than he was, saying, “It was always about Madonna. She was getting paid, but at the same time, we were selling more records and selling out concerts on multiple nights.” But if Madonna had more sales of her individual records, Prince made up for that number with the sheer volume of his output.
Further reading: From The Vault
No one could have hoped to put out as many records as he did, nor could anyone claim that all of them were some degree of good. There were still records that didn’t hit as well as others, but whereas Madonna did have more than a few albums that hit a sour note with the public, Prince was dipping his toes into every genre that he could think of and was mastering them to perfection.
He knew that he was better than anything that Madonna was doing, but if he couldn’t get his label to see that, it was time for him to move on. Besides, even if the biggest names in the music industry didn’t give him the time of day, what mattered was that more people were saying his name every single time they picked up one of his records.
