Oh honey baby, that's a dead end

The things I follow include two that don't usually have a lot in common: music and federal tax valuation. So when the estate of Michael Jackson and the IRS got into it over how much his music catalogs were worth, I was all ears. And the Tax Court judge wrote a beautiful, detailed opinion that filled in a lot of details about the life, times, and especially money of the deceased pop star. If you don't know who John Branca is (and I didn't), it's worth a read to see what he did.

Anyway, I thought I was going to get another such treat with the estate of Prince, or Prince R. Nelson, as he was legally known. But yesterday, in leafing through some tax news from last month, I discovered to my dismay that there will be no such fun. Prince's estate and the IRS have settled their dispute about the value of Prince's copyrights. A local court in Minnesota has to approve the deal, but if it does, we'll never see the gory details of the finances of the Purple One. Tax Court settlements are mostly secret, and there's never any explanatory opinion attached.

Oh, well. We'll always have that Super Bowl set. Damn.