Prince’s death in 2016 set off waves of grief at the passing of a music icon. It also set in motion complex legal battles that took years to resolve and have never fully ended.
The star, who died of a fentanyl overdose ten years ago Tuesday (April 21), was legendary for his attention to detail — in his image, his music and his intellectual property. He spent years battling with Warner Bros. over his record deals, closely policed his copyrights in the early days of YouTube, and later pulled his music from Spotify and other streamers over gripes about fair compensation.
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But owing to his sudden passing, that same meticulous artist also died without any sort of will, sparking a seemingly endless legal process to settle his estate. “It[‘s] a real mess that he left behind,” a legal expert told the Associated Press at the time. “I find it so hard to believe. How can there not be a will?”
The stakes were high. When he died, Prince left behind a sprawling set of property, including not just his famous Paisley Park mansion and other physical property, but also a prolific music catalog that had been bolstered in 2014 when Warner Bros. returned his masters for iconic albums like Purple Rain and 1999.
Because Prince had no children or spouse, the first challenge was to decide who would even be his heirs. The court eventually settled on his siblings, including sister Tyka Nelson and five half-siblings: Sharon, Norrine, and John R. Nelson; Omarr Baker; and Alfred Jackson. A bank, Comerica Bank & Trust, was named as a court-appointed administrator, handling the estate’s affairs while the probate case was litigated.
Three of the siblings later sold all or most of their shares to Primary Wave, giving that industry heavyweight control over half of the estate’s fate. The three others allied themselves with longtime Prince advisors L. Londell McMillan and Charles Spicer, who were themselves granted control of an undisclosed stake of the estate.
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After years of litigation, the case finally moved toward resolution in January 2022, when the heirs reached a deal with the Internal Revenue Service to set a final tax valuation of $156 million. The court then split the estate evenly in two, with Primary Wave controlling an entity called Prince Oat Holdings LLC and the McMillan-Spicer group controlling another called Prince Legacy LLC. The two groups have since operated under an agreement dictating how they administer his music and other jointly-held assets.
The final discharge of the probate case ended the legal battle over the future of the estate, which the heirs said would allow them to “protect and grow Prince’s incomparable legacy.” But it didn’t end the estate’s legal battles.
In 2024, McMillan and Spicer filed a lawsuit claiming heirs Sharon and Norrine Nelson were trying to force them out and seize control of Prince Legacy, even though they were “simply not capable” of running the estate: “They lack any business and management experience, have no experience in the music and entertainment industries, and have no experience negotiating and managing high-level deals,” McMillan and Spicer wrote at the time.
McMillan and Spicer largely won the dispute a few months later, when a judge ruled that the heirs had vested the two advisors with “broad and exclusive” powers and could not now amend the agreement simply because they “came to regret this decision.” But some elements of the case remain pending and await more litigation in Delaware court.
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Later in 2024, Primary Wave and Prince Legacy flexed their legal muscle to get Netflix to cancel a nine-part documentary by filmmaker Ezra Edelman that had been greenlit years earlier, citing “dramatic” inaccuracies and “sensationalized” claims.
Netflix formally pulled the plug in early 2025 and announced an estate-sanctioned replacement documentary, prompting Edelman to blast the move as a “joke.” He said nobody would see his film because he didn’t “feel like getting sued,” but that nothing in it had been inaccurate: “I can’t get past this — the short-sightedness of a group of people whose interest is their own bottom line.”
Then last year, the estate was sued by the singer Apollonia, a Prince protegee who claimed the estate had “embarked on an aggressive campaign” to cancel her trademark registrations to her name. She claimed that after Prince’s death, his estate had been on a mission to “acquire all things related to Prince even though it has no legal right to do so.”
In its own court filings, the estate said it had never asked her to change her name, but that it had rightly tried to revoke trademarks she had obtained during the “chaotic period” after his passing, when certain people secured trademarks that “rightfully belonged to Prince.” The case ended in a confidential settlement last month.
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