The Slaughterhouse

The pioneering NPG Music Club was launched in 2001, and gave subscribers the unprecedented opportunity to receive a steady stream of new and unreleased music directly from Prince’s studio. By 2004, Prince had released hundreds of songs and videos through his website — including live recordings, reworked versions of earlier songs, new material, and a series of narrated mixtapes called the NPG Ahdio Show.

Prince had accumulated so many songs that he began reaching back into his NPG Music Club offerings and organizing the highlights into albums. The first of those compilations, The Chocolate Invasion: Trax From the NPG Music Club, Volume 1 was released in March 29, 2004, and was accompanied on the same day by The Slaughterhouse: Trax From the NPG Music Club, Volume 2.

As with The Chocolate Invasion, many of the songs on The Slaughterhouse had already been released as singles — “Peace” and “The Daisy Chain” were even issued physically as limited-edition CDs during the 2001 Hit n Run Tour — but some of the songs had been rearranged or reworked from their original versions. Both The Chocolate Invasion and The Slaughterhouse were released as digital-only downloads for members of the NPG Music Club, and were re-released a decade later as digital downloads via TIDAL in 2015.