In 1987, fresh off the release of his virtually solo Sign O The Times, Prince was readying the release of his second album of the year, the mythical and eventually scrapped, The Black Album. In fact, the album came so close to be released that The Purple One had send his henchmen after every last promo copy that was sent out to DJs in the build up towards the album's release. Their mission: destroy any remnants of The Black Album. In 1988, Lovesexy took its place as the SOTT follow-up.

It wasn't until 1994 that the album once known as The Funk Bible was eventually released, but original pressings of those promos can still be found swirling the interwebs, available only to those bidders with knee-deep pockets. Last month, a copy miraculously surfaced on Discogs and absolutely destroyed the site's previous highest sale record -- an original pressing of David Bowie's Space Oddity sold for $6,826 earlier this year -- with an unfathomable $15,000 closing bid. Obviously, both sales were inflated by the passing of each of these respective icon's, but still, one can't help but wonder how many mortgages dude had to take out to cover the cost.

Luckily for us all, The Black Album was included in TIDAL's recent release of over a dozen rare Prince albums, the first time any of them have been available to stream.

h/t Pitchfork