He played everything, owned everything, and outran every label he signed to.
Prince wrote, produced, arranged and mostly performed his own records from the start, and the catalog reflects a musician who never stopped moving. The Warner Bros. run from Dirty Mind in 1980 through Sign o' the Times in 1987 covers minimal new wave funk, a stadium soundtrack, psychedelia and a sprawling double album in seven years.
Original US pressings from that run are plentiful, which is good news for diggers. Purple Rain sold in the tens of millions, and 1999 and Around the World in a Day both went multi-platinum, so clean originals of the biggest titles still turn up in ordinary bins at ordinary prices. The scarcity sits elsewhere: the early Warner albums from before the breakthrough, promo and picture-disc variants, the Paisley Park era side projects, and the posthumous vault releases.
Expect catalog-number inconsistency across the Warner titles. Multiple US plants handled the big sellers, and the label, sleeve and spine numbers do not always agree on the same copy. Around the World in a Day turns up as 25286-1, as 9 25286-1 and as WB 1-25286 depending on where you look, and none of those is wrong. Canadian, European, Japanese and Australian pressings circulate widely alongside the US ones, and the estate has kept remasters and anniversary editions coming since 2016, which keeps supply moving on the catalog titles.
Compare live listings for these records on Discogs, eBay, CDandLP, and Turntable Lab:
Search Prince vinylLinks to Amazon, eBay, CDandLP, and Turntable Lab are affiliate links. If you buy through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we show you or how results are ordered. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.