๐ญ 33 Years Ago Today, Prince Threw Away His Name — and It Wasn’t a Stunt — Woody Magazine, Jun. 7, 2026
33 Years Ago Today, Prince Threw Away His Name — and It Wasn't a Stunt
An unpronounceable symbol, the word "SLAVE" on his cheek, and a question he asked on his 35th birthday — who owns the music I made? Three decades later, Taylor Swift would ask it again.
Today would have been Prince's birthday. Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958. And exactly 35 years later — June 7, 1993 — he chose that same date to throw his own name away. His new name was a symbol no one could pronounce.
The world laughed. Here was the eccentric genius who had traded a household name for a glyph you couldn't even type. Three decades on, that is still the one-line version most people carry. But what Prince did was not a stunt. It was the most radical act of artist defiance in the history of the record business. To see why, you have to start with who he was.
1. Who He Was
Reduce Prince to a sentence and you get this: the man who shared the 1980s with Michael Jackson and Madonna. He sat down at the piano at seven and had mastered guitar and drums by fourteen. He spent his life playing dozens of instruments himself, on records he wrote, produced and performed largely alone. He built the "Minneapolis sound," a fusion of funk, rock, pop and R&B.
What made him a global star was the 1984 album and film Purple Rain. The album held No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for 24 straight weeks and sent "When Doves Cry" and "Let's Go Crazy" to the top of the singles chart. The semi-autobiographical film took in roughly $70 million in the U.S., and it won Prince an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score in 1985. Across his career he collected seven Grammys, sold more than 100 million records, and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, his first year of eligibility. In short: the name "Prince" was, by itself, an enormous brand. Throwing that name away is the whole point of this story.
2. What He Signed Away at Nineteen
The fight begins in 1977. At nineteen, Prince signs with Warner Bros. Records. The label funds the recording, the promotion and the distribution; in return, it keeps the recordings he makes. For a new artist, that is an ordinary deal. What it cost Prince was control of his own music — in two directions.
The first was ownership. A song splits into two kinds of rights. The composition — the tune and the words — usually stays with the person who wrote it. But the rights to the specific recording of that song, the master, went to the company.
Think of the composition as a recipe and the master as the photograph of the finished dish. You may own the recipe, but if the company owns the photo, the company earns the money every time that photo runs on the radio, in a film, in an ad — even though it's your song, sung by you.
There is one way out. The recipe is still yours, so if you record the same song again from scratch, you create a brand-new photo — a new master — that belongs entirely to you. Hold on to that loophole; it matters later.
The second was release. Prince wanted to put out album after album, several a year; the vault of unreleased songs behind him was rumored to run into the hundreds. Warner preferred to sell slowly, one record at a time, on the logic that flooding the market cheapened each release. So Prince needed the company's permission even to decide how often his own music appeared.
In 1992 the two sides signed a new contract reported to be worth $100 million. The core of the problem did not move. Prince neither owned his music nor controlled when it came out.
3. Throwing Away the Name
The next year, Prince hit back in the most public way imaginable. In 1993, timed to his 35th birthday, he issued a press release: his name would become a glyph fusing the symbols for male and female, topped with a horn.
Why the name? Because Warner had trademarked "Prince" and was selling his music under that banner. If he stopped being "Prince," the company's single most valuable asset — his name — turned worthless; you cannot market records under a symbol nobody can pronounce or type. He also hoped, more ambitiously, that it might let him slip out of a contract signed by "Prince Rogers Nelson."
Legally, it didn't work. His lawyer later recalled that Prince believed the change could void the contract, and that it simply could not. So the renaming became less a legal key than a public protest. From 1993 to 1996 he performed with the word "SLAVE" written on his cheek, comparing his record deal to slavery. The press took to calling him "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince."
He had thrown away even his name — and still the thing he wanted most, his masters, stayed out of reach. That fight had twenty more years to run.
4. Winning It Back, and the End
In 1996, when his Warner contract ran out, Prince released a three-disc album titled Emancipation and walked away. In 2000 he took his name back, too. The era of the unpronounceable symbol had lasted seven years.
But the masters of his Warner-era classics — Purple Rain among them — were still the company's. As it happens, Prince had been threatening to use that loophole for years. In a 1999 interview, he put it plainly.
In the end, re-recording was not how he won. U.S. copyright law lets creators reclaim their rights 35 years after a contract — and as that clock approached on his 1977 deal, the leverage swung to Prince. In 2014 he made peace with the very label he had once accused of treating him like a slave, signed a new agreement, and got his old masters back. "I got my stuff back," he said.
Two years later, on April 21, 2016, Prince died at Paisley Park, his own studio compound. The cause was an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a powerful painkiller. He was 57.
5. Why Now
There is a reason to tell this old story now. In May 2025, Taylor Swift spent roughly $360 million to buy back the masters of her first six albums in a single stroke. She, too, had signed away the recordings of her own songs as a young artist, and then watched those masters sold off — against her wishes — twice.
So Swift did what Prince had only talked about in 1999. She re-recorded her early albums from scratch and released them as "Taylor's Version." As fans switched to the new versions, the old recordings lost value, and Swift finally bought back the originals, ending a twenty-year fight. The loophole — re-record it, and the new master is yours — had become real in the hands of a singer three decades later.
The episode made artist ownership the hottest subject in music all over again. Labels have been rewriting their contracts since around 2023 to block "Swift-style" re-recording.
And the earliest, most extreme precedent for all of it was a man who, more than thirty years ago, threw away his own name on his birthday. We still file that under "eccentric genius." But the real question was never why he picked a strange name. It was this: who owns the music I made? Prince asked it on his 35th birthday, and 33 years later, the answer is still being worked out.
Prince's symbol was not an eccentric stunt. It was the opening shot of the ownership war that, three decades later, gave us "Taylor's Version."
Sources & further reading
- Source ↗ Britannica — Prince: biography, Purple Rain, awards, death · britannica.com
- Source ↗ ABC News — What it was like to be Prince's lawyer when he changed his name (the contract was not voided) · abcnews.go.com
- Source ↗ Billboard — Prince's career-long battle for artist rights · billboard.com
- Source ↗ NBC News — Prince's fight with the major labels over ownership (the 1999 "re-record" remark) · nbcnews.com
- Source ↗ Variety — Prince makes peace with Warner and regains his masters (2014) · variety.com
- Source ↗ Copyright Alliance — Prince's legacy: the 35-year termination right and his masters · copyrightalliance.org
- Source ↗ The Washington Post — Taylor Swift buys back her masters, ending the ownership fight (2025) · washingtonpost.com
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