Yeah how come Bowie got emojis 👨🏻‍🎤👩🏻‍🎤🧑🏻‍🎤

but Prince, George Michael, and Freddie Mercury got sweet fuck all? Yes, I know Freddie died pre-emoji you absolute pedants.

Edit: And what’s with all the downvotes? MFer can’t even have a thought in the shower without getting downvoted. Smh.

Images that are adopted as Unicode glyphs (including emoji) have to be in the public domain, i.e. not copyrighted or trademarked. When they were assembling the Unicode codepage for characters from vintage computer character sets, they left out the Atari ST Dobbshead character because the intellectual property status of the piece of vintage advertising clip-art it was derived from was unclear. Presumably someone (Prince’s estate and/or Warner Music, I’d guess) owns the copyright and/or has a trademark claim on the Prince symbol

What would be the use? What emotion or expression would it convey?

Isn’t it like 4 Unicode pieces layered over one another ?

You have symbols all over your shower too ehh? Mine are mostly red and 5 sided.

No

Add it to unicode too.

In case anybody doesn’t know the story behind the symbol, Prince created it because of a dispute with his record company. They wouldn’t let him do what he wanted and wouldn’t let him out of his contract, To perform outside of his contract he could change his name, but legally wouldn’t be able to refer to himself as the guy who used to be Prince - because that would be still using the name. This is a standard feature of recording contracts.

So he changed his name to a symbol and didn’t tell anyone how to say it. But people had to call him something, so after some brief confusion concert venues and the media settled on, “the artist formerly known as Prince.” He didn’t tell them to mention his former name, they did that on their own. And his recording contract didn’t apply to them, so the record company had nobody to sue. Essentially he was still performing as Prince, and the company just had to suck it. I will never stop admiring the brilliance of this.