Prince Magazine Cover Tributes From Around the World

No one was ready for the news when Prince died in his Paisley Park estate in April 2016. At 57, he was far too young, and as an incredibly prolific musician, it seemed he had so much more to share the world. And so his name and image were everywhere you looked. Few artists' deaths have commanded the same level of public and media memorials, with his likeness, often splashed with his signature color purple, gracing countless magazine covers.

Whether featuring iconic photos from Prince's past, album covers or artistic tributes, such as the New Yorker's fully purple cover that showed nothing but raindrops, each magazine took a stab at their own eulogy — one they knew would hold great meaning for fans.

"When a favorite musician dies, their void affects us in an abstract way similar to how their music speaks to us: it’s universal but inherently personal," Diffuser's James Stafford wrote last year, just a month before he passed away, in a year that brought many significant losses to the music community. "While we mourn the loss of a life, we’re also mourning the loss of something inside us. We’ve got to pull the shade down on happy memories that now sting just a little. And we have to watch the vibrant color these artists brought into our lives drift out of sight like a balloon that slipped from our grasp just a moment before we were ready."

Here, we've collected many of these magazine covers for a look back at how the media and its readers remembered Prince.