Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958, and died at Paisley Park, his studio complex in Chanhassen, on April 21, 2016, aged 57.1 Ten years later the Vault is still being opened: on August 28 his estate and Legacy Recordings released Timeless, ten unreleased recordings made between 1977 and 2016.2
The thing people search for most is whether Prince was the greatest guitarist of all time. That is a narrow way to ask about a man who also wrote hits for other singers, scored and starred in a film, played a Super Bowl in a downpour and gave his home city a sound with its name on it. Thirteen rankings on YouPickBest hold Prince or one of his records, and almost none of them ask about the same skill twice.
Prince is a serious candidate for best guitarist, best halftime show, best stage costume and best soundtrack, and nobody else in music is a candidate for all four.
Prince vs Jimi Hendrix: the greatest guitarist of all time
The guitarist ranking holds 59 players, from Robert Johnson and Django Reinhardt to Jack White and John Mayer. Prince is in it as a player in his own right, measured against specialists who did little else.
Rolling Stone's 2023 list of the 250 greatest guitarists placed Prince 14th.3 His case rests on the live recordings: long solos that grow out of funk rhythm parts, and a Telecaster-style guitar he could push from clean chords into hard-rock squeal within one song.
Jimi Hendrix, pictured next to him, remains the yardstick for every electric player since. He released three studio albums in his lifetime, and the field is still measured against them.
The case against Prince is hours. He divided his time between keyboards, drums, production and choreography, while Eddie Van Halen and Jimmy Page gave theirs to one instrument.
Prince vs The Beatles: the best discography
Discography rankings reward length and range, and Prince supplies both. The list runs to 51 artists, and Prince shares it with The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell and Kendrick Lamar.
His first album, For You, came out in 1978, and the Recording Academy notes that he played all 27 instruments on it himself.4 Over the next four decades Prince released dozens of studio albums and won seven Grammys from 38 nominations.
The Beatles make the cleanest contrast. Their recording career lasted eight years; Prince's lasted 38, and the Vault kept adding to it after 2016.
That length cuts both ways. The mid-1990s records, made during his fight with Warner Bros. over his name and his masters, are the ones critics rate lowest.
Super Bowl XLI: Prince in the Miami rain
The halftime ranking lists 26 shows, and Prince's 2007 set in Miami is the one the newer shows get compared with.
The NFL's own report on Super Bowl XLI described a game played in rain throughout, and Prince closed the show with "Purple Rain" while the weather made the title literal.5 He played the solo behind a lit sheet that threw his silhouette, guitar and all, across the stage.
The screenshot sets him against Lady Gaga's 2017 show in Houston.
When Doves Cry vs I Wanna Dance with Somebody
The 1980s pop-songs list is short and strict: 15 songs, one per artist. Prince is represented by "When Doves Cry", the lead single from Purple Rain.
The track has no bass line. Prince took it out at the mixing stage, leaving drum machine, keyboards and a stacked vocal, an odd choice for a single built for dance floors.
Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" gets the other half of the screenshot. Madonna, Michael Jackson, a-ha and Kate Bush complete a field where each artist gets exactly one entry, so Prince's whole decade has to fit into one song.
1999 vs Thriller: the best pop album of the 1980s
Prince could almost fill this ranking from his own catalogue: 1999, Purple Rain and Sign o' the Times are all on it. The frame uses 1999, the 1982 double album that came just before the fame.
According to his estate, 1999 was his first album to reach the Billboard 200 top ten, "Little Red Corvette" and "Delirious" both went top ten on the Hot 100, and the RIAA certified the record four times platinum.6
Thriller, released the same year, is the hardest possible opponent, the best-selling album in history. Madonna, Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen and Janet Jackson fill out a 51-album field.
The stronger claim for 1999 is influence. Its drum machines and synth stabs became the template for what was later called the Minneapolis sound.
Purple Rain vs Nevermind: the Grammy snubs
The Grammy-snubs list collects 14 albums that lost the big award or were never in the running, among them Illmatic, Back to Black and Kid A. Purple Rain is on it for one night in February 1985.
The 27th Grammy Awards gave their top album prize to Lionel Richie's Can't Slow Down, with Purple Rain among the nominees.7 Weeks later the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Prince the Oscar for Original Song Score.8
By then the album had spent 24 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, from August 1984 into January 1985.9
Nirvana's Nevermind, paired with it here, lost Best Alternative Music Album to Tom Waits. Richie's record was itself a huge seller, so the Purple Rain loss reads as a judgement on taste more than on scale.
Prince's Purple Rain coat vs Madonna's cone bra
The outfit ranking has 16 entries, and most belong to one performance: Lady Gaga's meat dress, Björk's swan dress. Prince's entry is a costume from a film.
The purple coat over a ruffled shirt was the Kid's uniform in Purple Rain in 1984, then on the tour that followed. Purple stayed his colour for good, and when he died, city halls in Boston and Los Angeles and the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis were lit purple.
Madonna's Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra from the 1990 Blond Ambition tour takes the right-hand card. The same ranking holds two Michael Jackson looks, with the red Thriller jacket and the single white glove.
Sign o' the Times vs Stop Making Sense
Concert films are an odd category to judge a musician in, and Prince is here because he directed his own. Sign o' the Times came out in 1987, after the European tour, and much of it was reshot on a soundstage at Paisley Park.
Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, its matchup here, is the usual consensus pick. The Last Waltz, Woodstock and Beyoncé's Homecoming round out 18 films.
The film's case is the band. Sheila E. plays drums, Cat Glover dances and raps, and the set leans on the double album of the same name, the record many critics call his best.
Beyoncé vs Prince at Coachella
Coachella has only been running since 1999, which makes this the youngest list Prince can enter. He headlined in April 2008, at 49, on a bill with Roger Waters and Jack Johnson.
Beyoncé's 2018 headline show, nicknamed Beychella, faces him in the screenshot and has become the festival's standard reference. Radiohead, Daft Punk and Kendrick Lamar are among the 27 sets.
Purple Rain vs Comfortably Numb: the guitar solo
The solo ranking is where the guitarist question gets specific: 61 solos, each one a single recorded passage. Prince's entry is the long closing solo of "Purple Rain", the ballad that ends both the album and the film.
A second Prince solo is missing from the list and may be the one more people have watched. At the Rock Hall's 2004 induction ceremony, where he was inducted himself, Prince joined the George Harrison tribute and took an extended solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".10
David Gilmour's "Comfortably Numb" solo takes the other card. Hendrix has four entries on the list and Led Zeppelin three.
Nothing Compares 2 U: the Prince song Sinéad O'Connor made famous
The music-video ranking has 18 entries, and Prince's is one he does not appear in. He wrote "Nothing Compares 2 U" in 1985 for The Family, a Minneapolis side project.
Sinéad O'Connor's 1990 version made it a worldwide hit, and its video is almost a single shot: her face in close-up, singing to camera, with tears near the end.
The screenshot pairs it with a-ha's pencil-sketch "Take On Me", and Thriller, "Sledgehammer" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" also feature.
The entry is the plainest case of Prince ranking as a songwriter for someone else, a habit that also gave the Bangles "Manic Monday".
Prince vs Bob Dylan: the greatest musician from Minnesota
Minnesota has produced two names for any all-time list, from opposite ends of the state. Bob Dylan was born in Duluth and raised in Hibbing on the Iron Range; Prince grew up in north Minneapolis.
The 18-act ranking also holds Judy Garland, born in Grand Rapids, the Andrews Sisters, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü's Bob Mould and Lizzo, who started her career in the Twin Cities.
Prince built a local scene around himself. Morris Day and The Time, and the producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, all came out of his Minneapolis circle, and Jam and Lewis went on to make Janet Jackson's Control.
Dylan's claim is the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 2016, the year Prince died.
Batman vs Parade: the best Prince album
The last ranking is Prince against himself, covering his studio albums through HITnRUN Phase One in 2015. The frame pairs two soundtracks that went in opposite directions.
Batman, his 1989 album for Tim Burton's film, held number one on the Billboard albums chart for six weeks and sold more than 11 million copies worldwide, according to his estate.11 Fans still tend to file it as a side job.
Parade (1986) was the soundtrack to Under the Cherry Moon, a black-and-white film he directed that flopped, and it carries "Kiss".
Purple Rain, Sign o' the Times and Dirty Mind are the usual front-runners in the same list.
Thirteen questions, one Minneapolis musician
These rankings ask about a guitarist, a songwriter, a film composer, a bandleader, a costume and a halftime show, and the same man from north Minneapolis is a credible answer to each of them. The catalogue keeps moving too: a stage version of Purple Rain begins Broadway previews at the Majestic Theatre on March 12, 2027.12
These thirteen orders all come from pairwise comparison, one head-to-head pick after another. A Prince question these thirteen leave out can become a ranking of its own in a couple of minutes.
More rankings, more angles
- What Kind of Best Is Michael Jackson? — Thriller, the moonwalk and the 1993 halftime show
- Madonna vs the Greats: Best Female Artist of All Time? 13 Lists — the other star who owned 1984
- Is Led Zeppelin the Best Band Ever? Where They Land on 12 Lists — Jimmy Page and the guitar-hero question
Sources
- Minnesota Historical Society, MNopedia — Prince (1958–2016), birth and death: mnhs.org (checked 2026-10-29)
- Sony Music Canada — Timeless, ten Vault recordings from 1977–2016, released August 28, 2026: sonymusic.ca (checked 2026-10-29)
- Rolling Stone — The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (2023), Prince at No. 14: rollingstone.com (checked 2026-10-29)
- Recording Academy — Prince artist page: 27 instruments on For You, seven wins from 38 nominations: grammy.com (checked 2026-10-29)
- NFL.com — Super Bowl XLI report, Miami, February 4, 2007: nfl.com (checked 2026-10-29)
- Prince Estate discography — 1999: chart peaks and quadruple-platinum certification: discography.prince.com (checked 2026-10-29)
- Recording Academy — 27th Annual Grammy Awards, Album of the Year: grammy.com (checked 2026-10-29)
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — 57th Academy Awards (1985), Original Song Score: oscars.org (checked 2026-10-29)
- Prince Estate discography — Purple Rain: 24 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200: discography.prince.com (checked 2026-10-29)
- Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — Prince, inducted 2004; George Harrison estate — the 2004 tribute and Prince's solo (checked 2026-10-29)
- Prince Estate discography — Batman: six weeks at No. 1, over 11 million sold: discography.prince.com (checked 2026-10-29)
- The Shubert Organization — Purple Rain at the Majestic Theatre, previews March 12, 2027: shubert.nyc (checked 2026-10-29)