Music fans are still mourning the death of Prince, and are still looking for ways to pay tribute to the late icon. In some cases, literally—Discogs has just announced that one of the rarest Prince albums has just shattered the record for most expensive item sold on its site. The album in question is Prince’s Black Album, which the artist once did his best to erase from existence. Discogs indicates a promotional copy of the album has just sold for $15,000 via the site, breaking the record set by a copy of David Bowie’s David Bowie, which sold for $6,826 not long after that music legend’s death in January.
Alternately referred to as the Funk Bible, the album was scheduled for release in December 1987, but Prince shelved it just a week before. The half million copies ready for distribution were destroyed, along with any promos that could be retrieved. The promo copies that survived were promptly bootlegged, which meant that the album that Prince created in an effort to move away from pop songs—and reestablish his mastery of the medium—ended up disseminated to the (black market) masses anyway.
The Black Album was officially released seven years later, but the 1987 promo copies became rarities, one of which has just topped Discogs Marketplace’s list of most expensive items for April 2016. Second place goes to …E Fu Il Sesto Giorno by Italian symphonic rock band Metamorfosi, which sold for $2,376, or roughly 2400 copies of Rumours.