Today everything makes a peculiar sort of sense. In death Michael Jackson’s stock has rocketed. The ten-album deal struck this week between Jackson’s estate and Sony Music is worth an unprecedented $270 million. To effect the biggest record deal in history when the music industry is supposed to be on its knees and you’re 6ft under is no mean achievement. As Craig Marks, the editor of Billboard, put it: “Death is not a terrible career move, for the estate and the record company.”
His point is well made. Michael Jackson has sold 31 million albums since his death. More importantly, with the singer no longer here to damage his own brand, the airbrushing can begin in earnest. If Jackson’s personal problems had marginalised him in his final years, his death allowed children to discover him just as they might discover a new artist.
With 200 unreleased recordings, that may be less of a problem than any of us imagines.
From a crude business perspective, a singer’s one commodity is the voice. If archives of the voice exist in sufficient quantities, then everything else can be procured. Sony will call in all the producers, remixers, software and video technology needed to ensure it can deliver product in a desirable light.
What Jackson tried to do by sailing a statue of himself along the Thames, by giving his album the ham-fisted title of HIStory, is happening by itself. All that stood between Jackson and the commercial resurrection he so desperately wanted was his continuing existence.
Source: TimeOnline
