Prince’s estate has been ordered to post a $1 million bond in a music licensing dispute. The estate has successfully obtained a block on releasing new music from the deceased artist, but a judge wants them to post a bond in good faith in case the engineer behind the collection of songs wins the trial.
Prince’s estate has been ordered to pay one million dollars towards the future lawsuit that will determine if Ian Boxhill had the right to release EP Deliverance, according to TMZ.
The money will go to the audio engineer if he wins the case against the estate.
A US judge blocked a planned release of new Prince music on the first anniversary of his death last month.
The Minnesota district court issued a temporary injunction barring the release of the six-song EP Deliverance after Prince’s estate argued that the recordings breached a confidentiality agreement between Prince and his former sound engineer.
According to court documents, Judge Wilhelmina Wright also ordered engineer Ian Boxhill to hand over all ‘original recordings, analog and digital copies, and any derivative works’ to Prince’s estate.
Deliverance was due to go on sale last month and would have marked the first in a series of planned posthumous releases of material by Prince.
He is said to have left a huge vault of discarded or unfinished material after his death of an accidental drug overdose on April 21, 2016.
Independent record company Rogue Music Alliance (RMA) said earlier this week that the six songs were recorded by Prince between 2006 and 2008 and Boxill spent the last year completing, arranging and mixing the songs.
Representatives of RMA, Boxhill and Prince’s estate did not immediately return calls for comment on the temporary injunction.
The title track Deliverance was removed from music streaming services late on Wednesday but not before reaching the No.1 spot on the iTunes rock songs charts.
Prince died at age 57 of an overdose of the painkiller fentanyl.
The value of his musical legacy, including a cache of unreleased recordings, has been estimated by some to exceed $500 million when factoring in future royalties, retail sales and commercial rights.
