Kevin Mazur/Getty ImagesIt's not quite free, but the singer and pioneering music distributor currently known as Prince has worked out quite the deal for his fans.
The artist will sell his upcoming three-disc album set exclusively through Target for the bargain (bin) price of $11.98.
"We are thrilled to have the opportunity to share his most recent work with our Target guests," said Senior VP of Merchandising Mark Schindele. And while Target isn't exactly your mom-and-pop shop down the street, the corporate home office is based in Minneapolis, just like Prince, a native Minnesotan himself.
The bundle will include two new Prince albums, MPLSOUND and Lotusflow3r, plus Elixer, a set of tracks by his protegée, Bria Valente.
"A whole lot of people are gonna get pregnant off of this," Prince told the Los Angeles Times in December about one of the ballads on Valente's debut.
Anyway, you can always count on Prince to come up with, if not exactly new, a different way to get his music to the masses.
This is his first deal with a big-box retailer, but in the past, in addition to selling tunes solely online, Prince has included entire albums in coffee table books (a live compilation in the 2008 book 21 Nights) and in the newspaper (2 million copies of Planet Earth were tucked into editions of London's Mail on Sunday in 2007).
Preview the new stuff at yet another of Prince's ad hoc websites, lotusflow3r.com.