Recently Surfaced Canadian Pressing Copy Of The Black Album Sells For USD $27,500
Discogs confirms the Most Expensive Item Sold for June 2018 is the 1987 original Canadian pressing of Prince’s The Black Album selling for USD $27,500. As the only known production copy from Canada, that makes this version of The Black Album one of the rarest pieces of vinyl in the world. This Canadian pressing supplants the previous record holder, the U.S. variant of The Black Album selling in April 2016 for USD $15,000.
Originally styled as The Funk Bible in press releases, The Black Album was slated for release in December 1987. At the last minute, Prince decided the album was “evil” ordering Warner Bros. to shelve the album and destroy every copy. Some promos had already been circulated, so they were out there to be passed around. Consequently, those promo copies are how The Black Album became one of the most bootlegged records of all time.
The Canadian version was submitted to the Discogs database in June by Jeff Gold, a former Executive VP at Warner Bros Records who worked with Prince. The record executive made news in December last year upon surfacing five sealed copies of the U.S. variant of the Prince rarity. Gold states, “as word spread of the discovery of the five sealed copies, a former Canadian record pressing plant employee contacted me with his an unbelievable story of his own. In 1987 he was working at Columbia Records Canadian pressing plant in Canada. When The Black Album was pulled and the copies that had been made marked for destruction, he kept one copy for himself. He never realized its rarity or value until reading about the discovery of the U.S. copies in Rolling Stone and contacted me.”
Only eight U.S. original vinyl copies have surfaced in the 30 years since, and now a single Canadian copy surfaces.
