The vault is real, it was larger than anyone outside a small circle understood, and it has been releasing music steadily for a decade.

Prince's archive at Paisley Park contained thousands of unreleased recordings — finished albums, alternate versions, live tapes, rehearsals. The posthumous release program has issued a substantial portion, and archivists suggest the remaining material could sustain releases for many years.

The releases have been better than the genre usually manages. Several posthumous albums drew genuine critical enthusiasm rather than the dutiful reception such projects typically receive.

This is partly a function of the material and partly of process. The estate has worked with engineers and musicians who worked with Prince directly, and has generally released recordings as they existed rather than completing them with contemporary overdubs.

The harder question is one no archive can settle: an artist notoriously controlling of his catalog left no instructions about what should be released after his death.

Scholars and former collaborators differ. Some argue that an artist who recorded constantly and released prolifically clearly intended the work to be heard. Others note that he shelved finished albums deliberately, sometimes for decades, and that shelving was itself an artistic decision.

The city's relationship to the legacy is its own subject. Minneapolis produced the sound, in clubs and studios that mostly no longer exist, and the physical traces are thinner than visitors expect.

First Avenue remains, and remains a working club rather than a monument, which most people here consider the correct outcome.

Paisley Park operates as a museum in Chanhassen, twenty miles from the neighborhoods where the music was made, an arrangement that reflects where the artist chose to build rather than any civic plan.

Local musicians describe the influence as structural rather than stylistic — less about the sound than about a demonstrated possibility: that an artist could build an independent career of global scale from here, and stay.

"Everybody points at the purple," a local producer said. "The thing that actually changed us is that he did not move."