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Poster for Slave Trade: How Prince Re-Made the Music Business
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Released
2014 · FILM

Slave Trade: How Prince Re-Made the Music Business

The revolution that changed the rhythm of the industry.

Directed by
Runtime
135 min
MusicDocumentary

Synopsis

In the mid-1990s, reports surfaced that Prince was in conflict with his record company. Having signed a new, $100 million contract just a couple of years earlier, he was now seeking—what most commentators considered reasonable—control over his masters and the freedom to release music on his own terms. After a contentious public dispute, during which Prince wrote "Slave" across his cheek at public appearances and frequently criticized his label, the two sides eventually reached a resolution, allowing Prince full control over his music and its distribution. He approached this new independence with innovative foresight, developing marketing concepts that, over time, became standard practices in the music industry.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 9

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Elio EspanaScored by Chris Ingham

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