A Super Rare Prince Record Has Surfaced

Are you looking for a reason to throw away $20,000? If so, let me just go ahead and slide my information over to you. Or, you can use that money to get your hands on a super rare Prince album.

In 1987, Warner Bros. pressed approximately 50,000 copies of The Black Album. Afterwards, Prince demanded that every single copy be recalled and destroyed, citing that the project was "evil." This order included the ones given in advance to executives. Despite their best efforts, five vinyl copies from the original pressing were recently discovered by a former Warner Bros. employee who was looking through some old boxes in a closet for records to give to his daughter, so she could use them for her first turntable. The finder of the extremely rare records, who wished to remain anonymous, sent an email over to former Warner Bros. Executive Vice President Jeff Gold.

Three of the rare records were sent to Gold, who currently runs a music memorabilia store called Record Mecca, for $15,000 a pop.

"I naturally assumed it was a fake," Gold toldRolling Stone. Gold then "wrote a polite response back that one really couldn’t tell if it was genuine unless you opened up the record and inspected it, and that almost all of them were unfortunately not authentic."

After finding out that a former Warner Bros. colleague made the discovery, Gold realized that the records might actually be the real thing. Gold quickly got on the phone in just a "few minutes" and eventually figured out that the records were indeed real.