Prince was notable for being a skeptic of online music. Those who manage his estate, though, have chosen to finally embrace it.

The records Prince produced during his time with Warner Bros., which include albums like 1999 and Purple Rain, will be available on Spotify and other streaming services starting Sunday.

The news was broken by Napster, formerly known as Rhapsody, which confirmed to NPR that it would start streaming the Prince classics this Sunday. Spotify told the BBC it will have the same material, and it's generally expected that Apple Music will have the goods as well. Amazon Music and iHeartRadio will also both have Prince's Warner Bros. collection beginning Sunday, representatives for those companies informed Ars via e-mail.

Prince aggressively enforced his rights online, insisting on taking down clips of his music placed on YouTube and elsewhere. In 2015, he pulled his music from all online streaming services except for Tidal. His music was involved in one long-running copyright case brought by the Electronic Frontier Federation, Lenz v. Universal, which sued Universal Music on behalf of a mom whose toddler was dancing to the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy."

In 2007, Prince's lawyers went after fan sites, sending cease-and-desist letters insisting that they remove album covers, artwork, images, and even their "own photographs of their Prince-inspired tattoos."

At the same time, Prince was a major innovator in bringing music online. He created his own online distribution system, the NPG Music Club, which was his official website beginning in 2001, and he won a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Shortly after that, he shut that setup down.

Making a streaming deal is an urgent matter for Prince's estate, which was worth about $200 million but may owe around $100 million in taxes. Tax experts say Prince could have probably dodged such a large tax bill, but he did little to shelter his assets. The artist left no will when he died in April from an accidental overdose of painkillers. His estate will be subject to a federal estate tax of 40 percent and a Minnesota state tax of 16 percent, but deductions will likely lower the total to about 50 percent.

The streaming deal will include all of Prince's albums from 1978 to 1996. Everything from the 1996 Emancipation album onward is owned "one hundred percent" by the estate, according to the estate's two special advisers who spoke with Billboard in an interview published yesterday.

"Some people may say, 'Why are you making all these deals? Prince wouldn't make these deals,'" said L. Londell McMillan, a music-industry attorney who is one of the estate's advisers. "Prince never wanted to lose ownership and control of his creations, so we place ownership and control [to] preserve the assets and stay within Prince's brand values.' As I have told everybody, there's not gonna be a big IRS truck backing up to Paisley Park saying, 'I'll take those assets!'"