Latest on MJJC

My Next Book: Michael Jackson, Inc. Zack O'Malley Greenburg, Forbes Staff

Looking forward to this book. I hope he covers Randy Jackson's (HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE) stint as MJ's manager and the mess he created. And of course, how he stole millions from MJ. I might buy two copies if he exposes Randy Jackson .
 
^^We will see. I also hope he explores all the other millions that people stole from Michael, and was able to give a good estimate of how much millions Michael gave to charity.
 
‘Michael Jackson, Inc’ Celebrates The King Of Pop’s Business Savvy
fullscreen-capture-3312014-12723-pm.jpg


Source: The Grio – By Andrea J. Castillo

Michael Jackson is by far one of the most iconic entertainers of our time, an icon who created a signature sound that we will never be duplicated.

After his death in 2009 at the age of 50, his musical legacy and business savvy were often overshadowed by his personal problems.

Author Zach O’Malley Greenburg looks to right that wrong in his forthcoming biography, Michael Jackson, Inc., which gives MJ fans some insight into why “The King Of Pop” was more than just a trailblazer in music, but in business as well.

Born and raised in New York City and a proud product of the hip-hop generation (he recounts one of his first musical purchases being Puff Daddy & The Family’s No Way Out), Greenburg has reported on how some the genre’s biggest stars make their money. As a senior editor for Forbes, Greenburg has been quite influential in letting us know the scoop behind top earners in hip-hop via the extremely popular annual Cash Kings list; a list that has been offering bragging rights to emcees since 2007.

“My career really started with hip-hop, and it’s fun to see as I’ve been covering it, it’s grown more and more into the mainstream,” said Greenburg.

In 2012, Greenburg released his first book entitled Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office, an in-depth exploration of how Jay Z became the mogul he is today. While writing this book, Greenburg became acquainted with Borbay, a New York based pop artist whom shared his love of hip-hop.

Says Greenburg: “I met Borbay a couple of years ago and he had seen the hip-hop ‘Cash Kings’ package. He kinda came across it because he had just done an exhibition called the ‘Kings of Hip-Hop’, which were his renditions of the most important figures in the genre. As a coincidence, they happened to be almost completely overlapping with the top seven earners in hip-hop on my Cash Kings list.”

This chance meeting evolved into a friendship that would lead the two to work together in the not too distant future.

Fast forward a year and Greenburg is working on a second book, Michael Jackson Inc., a retrospective of the Michael Jackson empire, aided by 100 never-before-told interviews of some of the industry’s biggest names, including the likes of Berry Gordy, 50 Cent, Sheryl Crow, and many more. He developed the angle for his book in the wake of Jackson’s death while covering the value of the Sony ATV catalogue Jackson had acquired in the mid-1980s.

“As I went on with that story, and the business of MJ and his financial life after death, the astounding amount of money he’s made since he died, over $700 million. That is more than any single living act has made over that period of time,” said Greenburg.

Greenburg believes that Jackson “was a trailblazer in the monetization of fame,” having been one of the first artists to have their own shoe line, a clothing line, and have a label simultaneously.

He tapped Borbay to collaborate on a cover image for the book. The end result was a bold painted portrait of the King of Pop at the height of his fame during the Bad era, layered with New York Post headlines on the face, projecting popular opinion on the iconic singer.

Greenburg hopes his book will open the eyes of Jackson fans of all walks of life to his business acumen.

“He laid the groundwork for this, and I think a lot of people forget or never even knew what a good businessman he was because of the late life struggles.”

Michael Jackson, Inc.: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of a Billion-Dollar Empire will be released on June 3, 2014. It is now available for pre-order at mjinc.co.
 
Zack O. Greenburg ‏@zogblog 14. Apr.

“He had a kid’s heart, but a mind of a genius.” -Berry Gordy on @MichaelJackson, from my MJ bio. Preorder: http://mjinc.co #MJMondays



Zack O. Greenburg ‏@zogblog 14. Apr.

Starting today, I'll tweet a quote once a week from my King of Pop business bio "Michael Jackson, Inc," due out 6/3. Stay tuned! #MJMondays

____

Michael Jackson, Inc.
21. April
MJ Mondays returns! Here’s the latest snippet from Michael Jackson, Inc. It’s a quote from Swizz Beatz, who was working with MJ toward the end of his life. “I was going to bring my wife [Alicia Keys] in to write, and we were going to do one big collaboration,” the producer recalls. “He was a big fan of hers. I heard he had a crush on her, so I was like, ‘Wow, MJ got a crush on my wife!’ . . . It was getting ready to become a great recipe.” Pre-order the book: http://mjinc.co/
 
im trying to decide if this is a book i wanna read
 
https://twitter.com/zogblog

Zack O. Greenburg @zogblog · 36 Min.
“He was so far advanced in the way he thought about things.” @Pharrell on @MichaelJackson for my MJ bio http://mjinc.co #MJMondays

Zack O. Greenburg @zogblog · 20 Std.
"It’s a modern, pop version of Citizen Kane.” - @SteveForbesCEO on my new book, @MichaelJackson Inc. Pre-order here: http://mjinc.co



Zack O. Greenburg @zogblog · 28. Apr.
“I don’t want to lose the deal…IT’S MY CATALOGUE.” -@MichaelJackson on buying Beatles/ATV, from my MJ bio http://mjinc.co #MJMondays
 
http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackoma...n-dollar-career-earnings-listed-year-by-year/

Michael Jackson’s Multibillion Dollar Career Earnings, Listed Year By Year
Mjmag.jpg


Michael Jackson’s latest posthumous album, Xscape, debuted earlier this month with opening week sales of 157,000, landing at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart. That will undoubtedly fatten the total amount the King of Pop has raked in since his death—well over $700 million in the past five years.

But Jackson earned far more than that during his life, thanks both to his musical prowess and his far less celebrated business savvy. In addition to releasing the best-selling album of all time and grossing hundreds of millions of the road, Jackson paved the way for modern musician-moguls by launching his own sneakers, clothes, video games and other ventures.

His lifetime total: $1.1 billion, or just shy of $2 billion when accounting for inflation. Add adjusted posthumous figures, and the number soars to nearly $3 billion.

“He was extremely smart,” says rapper-actor-entrepreneur Christopher “Ludacris” Bridges. “From my perspective, because I’m business-oriented and savvy, I noticed and even read up on everything he did.”

Jackson helped create a fundamental shift in the monetization of fame, and that’s the notion at the core of my book, Michael Jackson, Inc, the first business-focused biography of the King of Pop, which will be published on June 3rd by Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint.

At the end of the book is a table of annual earnings estimates for Jackson’s entire adult solo career, formulated by talking to over 100 entertainment industry insiders over the course of two years. But today, FORBES readers get a sneak peek at that research.

Highlights include the $134 million he made in the two years after the release of Thriller (an inflation-adjusted $306 million), the $125 million he banked in 1988 at the height of the Bad Tour (an inflation-adjusted $247 million), and the $118 million he earned in 1995 after scoring a nine-figure payout for merging his ATV publishing catalogue with Sony ’s own (an inflation-adjusted $181 million).

“He had good instincts . . . more, more, more; better, better, better,” says manager Sandy Gallin, who managed Jackson for much of the 1990s. “He would, in his mind, negotiate the same way. No matter what anybody would offer, he wanted more.”

Jackson’s earnings prowess was so great that, even after child molestation allegations rocked his career in 1993, he recovered and had one of his best years ever in 1995. But after a second round of accusations turned into a lengthy trial in 2005, the King of Pop was unable to regain his peak financial form—in his lifetime, that is.

Only after his sudden death in 2009 did Jackson once again start earning nine-figure sums annually. The executors of his estate scored a whopping $250 million new record deal from Sony, released concert film This Is It (which grossed over $260 million), and launched two Cirque du Soleil shows.

Jackson’s postmortem totals were also boosted significantly by earnings from the assets he accumulated in life—namely, the Sony/ATV publishing catalogue that contains the copyrights to most of the Beatles’ biggest hits, as well as other songs by the likes of Lady Gaga, Eminem and Taylor Swift.

Today, Jackson’s heirs still own half of that company, worth about $2 billion, through his estate. The King of Pop purchased the catalogue’s core in 1985 for $47.5 million, and it adds tens of millions to his bottom line every year.

“He had a kid’s heart, but a mind of a genius,” Berry Gordy told me in an interview for Michael Jackson, Inc. “He was so loving and soft-spoken, and a thinker. . . . He wanted to do everything, and he was capable. You can only do so much in a lifetime.”
 
Here are some of Borbay's other portraits:

Bono | 20”X20” | 2013 | Sold | Acrylic and Collage on Canvas | Process


I Am The One Who Knocks | 40”X40” | 2014 | Sold | Acrylic and Collage on Canvas |Process

Mickey O’Pitt | 30”X30” | 2011 | Available | Acrylic and Collage on Canvas | Process

Jay-Z The Portrait | 30”X30” | 2011 | Available | Acrylic and Collage on Canvas | Process

Uma Black Mamba | 30”X30” | 2012 | Available — Inquire | Buy Now | Acrylic and Collage on Canvas | Process

Dr. Bill Venkman | 40”X40” | 2012 | Available — Inquire | Buy Now | Acrylic and Collage on Canvas | Process

Detective Morgan Somerset | 36”X36” | 2012 | Available | Buy Now | Acrylic and Collage on Canvas | Process

Hunter S. Depp | 30”X30” | 2011 | Sold | Acrylic and Collage on Canvas | Process
 
Joe Vogel @JoeVogel1 · 6 h.

Much respect to @zogblog for his integrity with Michael Jackson, Inc. It's infinitely easier 2 sell sensationalism on MJ to publishers/media
 
Q&A: Zack O’Malley Greenburg, ‘Michael Jackson, Inc.’
http://soultrain.com/2014/05/29/qa-zack-omalley-greenburg-michael-jackson-inc/

Throughout his lifetime, books written about Michael Jackson have typically, and often repeatedly, covered the peaks and valleys and scandalous aspects of his life and career; however, for Forbes senior editor Zack O’Malley Greenburg, there is another side of Jackson worthy of exploring.

In Michael Jackson, Inc., through interviews and stories from several of Jackson’s personal and professional connections like Berry Gordy, Teddy Riley and Jackson family members, Greenburg uncovers, in intimate detail, why Michael Jackson the businessman deserves equal recognition as Michael Jackson the entertainer.

SoulTrain.com spoke with Greenburg to discuss his book that covers the highs and lows of many of Jackson’s key business moves, his influence on the entertainment industry at-large, and the intimate details and long-term effects of his acquisition of The Beatles’ music catalog.

SoulTrain.com: When you began to research and write this book, what was the big picture like for you?
Zack O’Malley Greenburg: The inspiration for Michael Jackson, Inc. came out of covering the business of Michael Jackson for Forbes. After he died, I really started to notice that there was this incredible amount of cash being generated by everything related to the King of Pop and the more I followed the story, the more I realized that it was a result of business deals he made during his life, the moves he made, and the empire he built. It set me on the path of trying not to look at his financial life after death but look at his entire career from a business perspective, and the kind of moves he made and how it revolutionized entertainment.

SoulTrain.com: You spoke with many of his professional connections; how were you able to narrow it down to those included in the book? Was there anyone you wanted to talk to but couldn’t?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: It was definitely a tough process to whittle everything down into a manageable amount. There are so many people connected to his life, but I thought one of the important things to do was to condense and simplify this massive web of business connections he had over his entire life. I tried to hone in on the most relevant characters and streamline everything without sacrificing any of the specificity and detail. There are people I would’ve liked to talk to—Diana Ross is one. But Diana Ross and Quincy Jones have done so much on Michael and have talked about him so much, that I think they’re kind of tired of it! But I got to talk to a ton of people like Berry Gordy, Walter Yetnikoff, Pharrell Williams, Sheryl Crow and Jon Bon Jovi. There are a lot of juicy little anecdotes that haven’t been reported yet and I’m really excited for it to see the light of day.

SoulTrain.com: When it came to the fundamentals of business, he both directly and indirectly learned a lot from industry titans like Berry Gordy, of course, and John H. Johnson. Who would you say he pulled or drew from the most?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: I think Berry Gordy was really his first inspiration when it came to business. Berry told me that when he was at Motown, he was kind of doing everything simultaneously; he’d be in the studio but he’d be taking calls all the time and doing business deals. And Michael—everybody told me—was just a sponge for knowledge. He’d soak up everything and sit there and watch and listen. Berry Gordy told me that would happen a lot and young Michael would be just sitting there watching and taking it all in. I think he learned a lot by osmosis in that way.

SoulTrain.com: You note that Smokey Robinson didn’t exactly deem Joe Jackson a businessman, at least in the technical sense of the word. Surely though, beginning with the Jackson 5 and up to a certain point, Michael Jackson picked up some business know-how from his father, no?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: His father was definitely persistent. And I think that was a really important part. He pushed his kids towards perfection and that’s something that definitely stuck with Michael, for better or worse. So for sure, I think there were lessons he got from his dad, too.

SoulTrain.com: The Jackson 5 and The Jacksons made several appearances on Soul Train; in addition, Michael was interviewed by Don Cornelius many times on the show. Given this, do you think that perhaps he also observed Cornelius who, of course, was also known for his outstanding business acumen?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: That’s a good point. To be honest, that’s an angle I didn’t get a chance to explore but that certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

SoulTrain.com: To this day, Michael Jackson’s purchase of The Beatles’ catalog remains one of the biggest and most often discussed business entertainment stories ever. In the book, you note how the air surrounding this acquisition became turbulent, with many, including Jackson himself, noting that not everyone was thrilled with his ownership of it. Can you speak on this?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: Michael Jackson’s purchase of the Beatles catalog for $47.5 million is probably one of the greatest deals made in the history of the music business. Today, his stake, which is half of the Sony/ATV entity, is probably worth about $2 billion. That’s such an incredible return on investment. The thing was, at the time, people thought he was crazy and this was one of the things I found in reporting for the book: A lot of his close advisors, really successful people in the music business, thought that he was paying an outrageous sum of money and this would never be a good deal for him. But the way he looked at it was that this was like a fine work of art—like a Picasso—and in his mind, you couldn’t really put a value on something like that. It was priceless. He said these were the greatest songs of all time and he was going to get them. He made a note to [his attorney] John Branca who was negotiating with the Australian billionaire who owned the Beatles catalog—the note said, “John, please let’s not negotiate; it’s MY CATALOG.” I think that was really a turning point; not just for his business career but for entertainment, as well, where you see entertainers sort of start to go essentially from performing to being owners and employers.

SoulTrain.com: With the purchase of the Beatles catalog being a very major move, how would you say it impacted his other business ventures?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: Subsequent to that, he did a lot of things in the late 80s and early 90s, like launching his own clothing line, shoe line and record label. These things didn’t necessarily take off for him, but earned him tens of millions of dollars anyway, and it really paved the way for the likes of Diddy, Jay-Z and acts like that to have gone on to make those kinds of things almost a prerequisite for success in the music world. A lot of that dates back to Michael Jackson taking the idea of monetizing fame and completely revolutionizing it and coming up with all of these different ways artists could prosper from their celebrity.

SoulTrain.com: The book notes how Michael Jackson’s showman side and businessman side intersected when it came to his perfectionist mentality. From a business standpoint, would you say that way of thinking was a help? A hindrance?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: I think it’s a little bit of both. When you’re driven to be the best all the time, particularly when the standard is one you’ve already set (like with Thriller), it can sometimes be very hard to top it. By definition, it’s nearly impossible to top the greatest of anything; I mean, it’s the greatest for a reason. Thriller was the greatest selling album of all time and it’s certainly an incredible work, musically. He was obsessed with topping that from both standpoints and I think it was really damaging to him when the sales figures and the reviews for his albums weren’t quite up to that standard. I think he was very consumed with the desire to top Thriller in all possible aspects and I think that led to him sometimes delaying albums to perfect them, which in turn had an impact on some of his outside business ventures that were supposed to be picked up with the launch of these albums. I think that was definitely a theme throughout his career.

SoulTrain.com: From his die-hard to casual fans, it seems not everyone knew about his corporate savvy. Why do you think his business sense wasn’t acknowledged like his showmanship was?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: I think the negative publicity around him later in his life, starting with the [sexual molestation] allegations in the early 90s and going forward through to the end of his life, really overshadowed all the good things. Particularly, from a financial standpoint, I think because the media was so fixated on his financial woes and in many cases, was kind of overseeing them, that it really wiped away the truth, which was that he was quite a savvy businessman. The only reason why he was able to rack up such a large amount of debt was that he had such a vast amount of assets and was worth so much on paper because of his business savvy. He had the collateral that he needed to take out those loans; he really was like a corporation in and of himself. There are plenty of corporations out there that are worth about half as much as their assets and I think mainstream media isn’t used to that and weren’t able to grasp that in their conceptualization of him and his career.

SoulTrain.com: You detail how involved Michael Jackson was with the hip-hop community—how he often had conversations with the likes of 50 Cent and Nas—and even how R&B and hip-hop producer Rodney Jerkins learned from him how to buy catalogs. Can you expound on his connection to hip-hop?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: I think that’s another one of the things that comes out in this book—Michael Jackson’s impact on hip-hop. A lot of the guys I talked to—including Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz, 50 Cent, Nas and Diddy—all these guys will tell you that they grew up idolizing Michael Jackson and they will also tell you that he was up on every kind of music, in particularly, hip-hop, right up until the very end of his life. Diddy actually told me Michael Jackson knew hip-hop like he was born in the South Bronx in the 80s. He lived and breathed it, from the music to the dancing. He even featured The Notorious B.I.G. on HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I in ‘95 before he had really even ascended to the heights that he eventually did. He knew what was going on, he paid attention, and I fully believe that if he were around today, making new music, he would have continued to work with some of the big hip-hop acts. At the time of his death, he was working with Swizz Beatz and he was having conversations with Pharrell and Nas. I think hip-hop was a huge part of Michael Jackson.

SoulTrain.com: Through researching or writing this book, did anything surprise you along the way?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: I think one of the things I didn’t quite realize was just how focused Michael Jackson became on making a film career for himself in Hollywood. We started to see that with The Wiz, obviously, and then going forward with Captain EO and so forth. Around the time the allegations really turned his career upside down in the early 90s, he was well into a couple of huge movie deals. He had a couple of things in development that were going to be really big and there are some details on that in the book. I fully believe he would’ve accomplished it if it hadn’t been for the allegations because after that happened, he just became somebody who the studios didn’t really want to associate with. I really think that he could’ve had sort of an “Elvis-like” aspect to his career, as far as on the screen goes.

SoulTrain.com: What would you like readers to take away from the book?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: I want people to get that Michael Jackson was not only the greatest entertainer of all time but that he was really as much a revolutionary when it came to the business of entertainment as he was when it came to the performance aspect.
 
I read the so called review on WallStreetJ , what a hateful piece of shit . I tried to comment but for unknown reason I could not.

It's astonishing to see the amount of jealousy and envy directed at MJ . The article has nothing to do with the book , it is certainly not a review of it but a rehash of the tabloids' stories for the last 30 years. The hate and envy can't be any more obvious.

Murdoch and his cronies can't allow the public to view MJ as a smart man. I will keep my mouth shut as I don't want to get banned.
 
Last edited:
Paris78;4015329 said:
Joe Vogel @JoeVogel1 · 6 h.

Much respect to @zogblog for his integrity with Michael Jackson, Inc. It's infinitely easier 2 sell sensationalism on MJ to publishers/media
Click to expand...

^SO, So, So true. I am glad someone put that bit of information out there.

I like this part of the write up above: Jackson’s earnings prowess was so great that, even after child molestation allegations rocked his career in 1993, he recovered and had one of his best years ever in 1995. But after a second round of accusations turned into a lengthy trial in 2005, the King of Pop was unable to regain his peak financial form—in his lifetime, that is.

^^This tells me that Zack is putting the issues in context. I was wary about his book before, because I heard him on 60 minitues talking about debt due to the over-spending of the 80s. I was worried that he would just list a number of debts without putting the whole thing in to context. I mean mIchael did not have low cash flow because he went shopping every week. That is something I find missing from a lot of people's writings or statements about Michael. They tend to just give a whole bunch of statements of woe/downfall/doomsday without showing why something happened. I noticed that a lot in the trial too, but I should not digress....

I think this may end up to be one of the books I will actually read myself, rather than just buying it for others. I will see.

From the Soultrain Q&A: There are plenty of corporations out there that are worth about half as much as their assets and I think mainstream media isn’t used to that and weren’t able to grasp that in their conceptualization of him and his career.

^^I am so glad he pointed this out too. So many like to dismiss this as though Michael's situation was quite unique. It is part of their MO to discredit him professionally and artistically.

I don't think, like Zack does, that he held back on albums partly because he wanted to top Thriller. I think he was just an intense perfectionist (something Zach noted) and felt they were not up to his level of excellence. Of course I felt he wanted to top Thriller, but not that he held back the albums for that reason. I think the media trying to belittle his work constantly brought that up and made it the focal point whenever they mentioned sales of his work. I did not know he had conversations with 50 cents (who has now dropped to 1 cent), but it might not have been many conversations.

Soundmind what do you expect from the Wall Street Journal. Let's see what the NYT has to say, since Sullivan and his friends are working there.
 
Last edited:
"SoulTrain.com: What would you like readers to take away from the book?

Zack O’Malley Greenburg: I want people to get that Michael Jackson was not only the greatest entertainer of all time but that he was really as much a revolutionary when it came to the business of entertainment as he was when it came to the performance aspect."

Yes!!!

I am looking forward to this book. Also appreciate this interview w. Soul Train and what he has to say here, esp. re how the 90's allegations upended his career in terms of his finances and business plans, although he managed to come back on top to be "right back where I wanna be--I'm standing though you're kicking me!" Glad Zack talks about how MJ wanted to make movies. I agree when he says there was so much material and so many poeople involved in MJ's life and career. Also the idea that he was in himself a corporation.

I wish in the wsj review that they would talk about MJ's charitable contributions--$300 M is not small change!
 
RF wrote another article , I did not read it just saw the title, all I can say the guy has lost his mind
 
Last edited:
The following is an excerpt from the new book Michael Jackson, Inc.

Once every few months during the mid-1980s, a handful of America’s savviest businessmen gathered to plot financial strategy for a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate.
This informal investment committee included David Geffen, who’d launched multiple record labels and would go on to become one of Hollywood’s richest men after founding DreamWorks Studios; John Johnson, who started Ebony magazine and would become the first black man to appear in the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans; John Branca, who has since handled finances for dozens of Rock and Roll Hall of Famers including the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones; and Michael Jackson, the King of Pop and chairman of the board, inscrutable in his customary sunglasses.

Shares of the entertainment company in question were never traded on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ. Though few would even consider it to actually be a company, this multinational’s products have been consumed by billions of people over the past few decades. Had the organization been officially incorporated, it might have been called Michael Jackson, Inc.

In 1985, this conglomerate made its most substantial acquisition: ATV, the company that housed the prized music publishing catalogue of the Beatles. Included were copyrights to most of the band’s biggest hits, including “Yesterday,” “Come Together,” “Hey Jude,” and hundreds of others. The catalogue, later merged with Sony’s to form Sony/ATV, currently controls more than two million songs by artists ranging from Eminem to Taylor Swift, making it the world’s largest music publishing company.

At an investment committee meeting months before the deal was consummated, however, the acquisition was looking unlikely. Michael Jackson, Inc. was deep into negotiations with Australian billionaire Robert Holmes à Court, whose asking price for ATV had soared past $40 million—prompting disagreement among Jackson’s inner circle over how to proceed.

Order Michael Jackson, Inc

Not wanting to upset anyone, Jackson remained silent—as he often did in meetings—but he’d already made his decision. He scrawled a note on the back of a financial statement and passed it to Branca beneath the table.

“John please let’s not bargain,” it read. “I don’t want to lose the deal . . . IT’S MY CATALOGUE.”

A few months later, Jackson bought ATV for a price of $47.5 million. Today, Sony/ATV is worth about $2 billion; through Jackson’s estate, his heirs still own his half of the joint venture. That wouldn’t be the case were it not for the shrewd maneuvering and unwavering resolve of Jackson and his team. The incredible story begins more than a quarter century ago, in the United Kingdom, during an encounter between a famous knight and a soon-to-be king.

One night in 1981 at Paul McCartney’s home just outside of London, the former Beatle handed Michael Jackson a binder. Inside was a list of all the songs whose publishing rights were owned by McCartney. After letting much of his own songwriting catalogue slip away as a youngster, he’d been buying up copyrights for years.

“This is what I do. I bought the Buddy Holly catalogue, a Broadway catalogue,” McCartney told the young singer. “Here’s the computer printout of all the songs I own.” Jackson was fascinated. He wanted to start doing the same, and his entrepreneurial instincts quickly clicked into gear. “Paul and I had both learned the hard way about business and the importance of publishing and royalties and the dignity of songwriting,” Jackson wrote in his autobiography.

When he got back to California, he found himself with an enviable problem. He’d earned $9 million in 1980 and was sitting on a pile of money that needed to be invested. Inflation was rampant in the early 1980s, meaning that fallow cash would start to lose value quickly. In short, he needed to find some worthwhile places to park the reserves of Michael Jackson, Inc.

His accountants brought him a number of real estate deals, but he wasn’t excited enough to buy anything. He wanted to buy songs. So his attorney, John Branca (now co-executor of Jackson’s estate), started talking to people in the publishing business to find out what was for sale. One of his first conversations was with songwriter Ernie Maresca, who had two big rock songs available: “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer.” When Branca told Jackson, the singer didn’t recognize them. The lawyer gave his client a tape and told him to have a listen. A few days later, Jackson called back. “You gotta get those songs!” he said. “I danced to them all weekend.”

Thus began a buying binge for Branca and Jackson. They picked up a small catalogue that included “1-2-3,” a 1960s soft-rock love song by Len Barry; “Expressway to Your Heart,” a Gamble and Huff composition released by the Soul Survivors in 1967; and “Cowboys to Girls,” a 1968 hit by the Intruders composed by the same duo. If Jackson didn’t know a song, Branca would send him a recording; if the singer fell in love with it, he’d give the go-ahead to acquire it.

Longtime associate Karen Langford remembers sitting around with Jackson during this period and discussing which of the greatest songs of all time would be best to own (he often mentioned ones by the Beatles, Elvis, and Ray Charles, among others). Sometimes he’d quiz Langford, singing a snippet of a song and asking if she could give the title and performer. Even then, he had his eye on ownership at a scale few could have fathomed at his age.

“He wanted to be the number one publisher in the world,” she says. “And . . . it would come up in lots of different ways, but [his goal] was always number one, getting to that number one spot. Being the biggest, being the best.”

In Pictures: Michael Jackson’s Career Earnings, Listed Year-By-Year

What the singer really wanted was Gordy’s Jobete catalogue, home to most of Motown’s greatest hits, including those of the Jackson 5. Gordy says Jackson offered him a “competitive” price for it at one point, but the Motown chief wasn’t ready to sell—and didn’t, until EMI paid him $132 million for half of the catalogue in 1997.

But watching Gordy manage his publishing interests had set something ablaze inside Jackson. “He got the bug,” says Gordy. “And that gave him the [urge] to want to do something even greater.”

***

“Michael,” began Branca, coyly, at a meeting in September 1984, “I think I heard of a catalogue for sale.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s ATV.”

“Yeah, so what’s that?”

“I don’t know, they own a few copyrights, I’m trying to remember,” said Branca, pausing for effect. Then he offered a few names: “Yesterday,” “Come Together,” “Penny Lane,” and “Hey Jude.”

“The Beatles?!” Jackson exclaimed.

The only problem: the catalogue belonged to billionaire Robert Holmes à Court, an Australian corporate raider known for a steely patience, a penchant for backing out of deals at the last minute, and a stubbornness that rivaled that of any rock star. He also had plenty of other suitors for ATV, including billionaire real estate developer Samuel LeFrak, Virgin Records founder Richard Branson, and the duo of Marty Bandier and fellow publishing executive Charles Koppelman (Bandier was hired to run Sony/ATV in 2007 and remains the company’s chief executive).

For Holmes à Court, there were few pleasures greater than a grueling business negotiation. He took particular glee in toying with overzealous Americans (“They are just looking for me to play according to their rules and make it a big game,” he once said of his stateside counterparts. “The Viet Cong didn’t play by the rules, and look what happened.”) None of that mattered to Jackson. His instructions to Branca: “You gotta get me that catalogue.”

The lawyer remembers the frenzied days that followed. His first task: to check in with Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono, both friends of Jackson. As John Lennon’s widow, Ono was in charge of his estate and was rumored to have had some interest in making a joint offer for ATV with McCartney. Jackson was hoping to avoid a showdown.

“I got Yoko on the phone,” recalls Branca. “And then I said, ‘Michael asked me to call you and find out if you’re bidding [on] ATV Music that owns all the Beatles songs.’ ”

“No, we’re not bidding on it.”

“No?”

“No, no, if we had bought it, then we’d have to deal with Paul,” replied Ono. “It’d have been a whole thing. Why?”

“Because Michael’s interested.”

“Oh, that would be wonderful in the hands of Michael rather than some big corporation.” (When I asked Ono about the conversation some thirty years later—in the midst of a brief interview prior to an anti-fracking rally at New York’s ABC Carpet & Home, of all places—she said she didn’t have “a complex dialogue” with anyone on Jackson’s team, but wouldn’t elaborate.)

Branca says his next move was to check in with John Eastman, Paul McCartney’s lawyer and brother-in-law (he represented the singer along with his father, Lee Eastman, who started working with McCartney before the Beatles broke up). According to Branca, Eastman said McCartney wasn’t interested because the catalogue was “much too pricey.” This was one of many reasons that neither Branca nor Bandier believed McCartney would lay out such a large amount of cash.

Though the Beatles’ songs made up roughly two-thirds of ATV’s value, the remaining third consisted of assets McCartney didn’t want: copyrights to thousands of other compositions, a sound effects library, even some real estate. “Paul’s demeanor was very, very much more financially structured,” says Bandier. Adds Joe Jackson: “The only reason Michael bought that catalogue was because it was for sale! [McCartney and Ono] could have bought the catalogue themselves. But they didn’t.”

There’s also an artistic explanation for McCartney’s unwillingness. “I never thought Paul McCartney would buy it because it’s very difficult for a creator of something [to buy] it,” says Bandier. “It would be like Picasso, who spent a day doing a painting, to buy it for $5 million like twenty years later. It wouldn’t be a thing that Paul would do.”

In Pictures: Michael Jackson’s Career Earnings, Listed Year-By-Year

Branca opened with an offer of $30 million. But Holmes à Court wanted more, especially since Bandier, Koppelman, and a few other suitors were still interested in buying ATV. By November, Jackson had authorized Branca to raise his offer beyond $40 million. With the exception of John Johnson, Jackson’s advisors—even music executives like David Geffen and Walter Yetnikoff—thought the singer had lost his mind.

The latter told Jackson he was making a mistake and that he should stick to being an artist. “That was my advice,” says the former CBS chief. “And he disregarded it, luckily.” Jackson didn’t have a business school education, and multiples of cash flow meant little to him. But he had a tremendous sense of value—and in Branca, a lieutenant able to help him make the most of that.

“John was the financial concierge in executing Michael’s instincts,” says billionaire Tom Barrack, who’d go on to work with Jackson later in the singer’s life. “So Michael said, ‘Wow, I think there’s incredible value [in the Beatles’ songs] over time. Quite honestly, Michael didn’t know if they were worth $12 million or $18 million or $25 million. He just knew and anticipated correctly that over time the intellectual property was going to be worth a lot of money.”

Jackson’s constant refrain: “You can’t put a price on a Picasso . . .you can’t put a price on these songs, there’s no value on them. They’re the best songs that have ever been written.” During a finance committee meeting, Jackson wrote Branca the aforementioned note that still sits in the lawyer’s home: “IT’S MY CATALOGUE.”

Order Michael Jackson, Inc

A bid of $45 million was good enough to earn Jackson and Branca a meeting in London that winter, but Holmes à Court refused to go himself. Since the deal was far from being completed, Branca did the same, sending his colleague Gary Stiffelman in his stead. The two sides agreed on a nonbinding statement of mutual interest, and Jackson’s team embarked upon a four-month due diligence review of the 4,000-song catalogue.

To verify ATV’s copyrights, a team of twenty spent some 900 hours examining close to one million pages of contracts. Branca met Holmes à Court in New York that April and agreed to a handshake deal. Within weeks, however, the mogul had backed out. So, with Jackson’s blessing, Branca sent another letter: accept the last offer of $47.5 million, or there would be no deal.

Around the same time, Branca learned that Holmes à Court had tentatively agreed to sell the catalogue to Koppelman and Bandier for $50 million. But he knew his rivals—and some of the places they were getting their money. As it happened, their company had picked up a hefty publishing advance from MCA Records, headed at the time by Irving Azoff, who’d served as a consultant for Jackson and his brothers’ most recent tour.

“I went to Irving and I said, ‘How can you fund Charles and Marty? They’re bidding against Michael and you’re the consultant,’ ” Branca recalls. “[Azoff] pulled the deal, and [their ATV agreement] fell through.”

Shortly thereafter, Branca received a call from one of Holmes à Court’s colleagues. Could he come to London and close the deal? They agreed on $47.5 million. Jackson granted Branca power of attorney, and the lawyer flew to New York and boarded a Concorde bound for Britain. Once inside the supersonic jet, however, he noticed two familiar faces also on their way to London: Bandier and Koppelman.

“What are you doing over there?” Bandier asked.

“Oh,” said Branca, “just some business.”

Bandier was ready to do some business of his own. Even after Branca had convinced Azoff to pull his funding, he and Koppelman thought they could scrounge up enough capital to make a $50 million bid for ATV—and that all they needed was to buy themselves a little time. Recalls Bandier: “We actually went to London to sort of finalize a more formal contract.”

He and Koppelman figured that Holmes à Court had no interest in music publishing and was simply looking to unload ATV as quickly as possible. They weren’t counting on his patience, or the glee he may have derived from a bit of corporate sport. They certainly weren’t expecting what Holmes à Court was about to tell them when they arrived: that he was set to unload ATV to another party for $2.5 million less than they had offered.

Face to face with Holmes à Court and on the verge of losing the deal, Bandier immediately upped his offer by another $500,000. The Australian wasn’t impressed.

“There’s one aspect of the deal that you guys can’t do,” he replied. “And that is do a concert in Perth for my favorite charity.”

“We can do a charity concert,” Bandier pressed, figuring he could easily leverage his connections, and perhaps his cash, to lure just about any big act.

“No, no, you don’t understand,” continued Holmes à Court. “I’m selling this to Michael Jackson.”

***

Fittingly, Jackson had sealed his biggest deal by throwing in a personal appearance as a sweetener. It wasn’t an easy favor, either—he would have to fly fifteen hours from Los Angeles to Sydney, change planes, and then fly another five hours to Perth. But not even a pack of dingoes could have stopped him from getting his catalogue.

Bandier later learned that Jackson had offered another perk. Holmes à Court’s daughter was named Penny, and they were willing to exclude the song “Penny Lane” from the deal so that the billionaire could give it to her as a present (Jackson’s company continued to administer the song for her). It was far from a minor concession.

“Any song that you own of the Beatles earns money,” says Bandier. “There’s only like two hundred fifty of them, and everybody has a favorite of the two hundred fifty. Believe me, ‘Penny Lane’ is a popular song.” But the kicker was the appearance in Perth. “We knew that we couldn’t do the moonwalk, so there was no question,” Bandier remembers. “It wasn’t going to happen.”

Jackson’s single-minded focus on buying the catalogue despite vociferous objections from the record industry’s brightest minds might strike some as impetuous. But in hindsight, it’s clear that he was correct to follow his instincts, even to those who doubted him at first—and that his sense of the value of copyrights was impeccable.

“I think if you were his advisor at that time you would have told him, ‘Don’t do it,’ ” says Yetnikoff. “Turns out that it was a very lucrative investment. . . . So I would have to say that his business acumen is better than mine.”

Jackson certainly never forgot that he’d been right. In 2007, on a conference call with Bandier, the executive recounted the story of ATV’s 1985 sale. Jackson was delighted to relive the experience.

“See,” he said. “I told you I knew the music publishing business.”

The above text is adapted Michael Jackson, Inc, published by Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint on June 3rd. Like the rest of the book, it is based almost entirely on original interviews; see Michael Jackson, Inc.’s bibliography for a full list of sources. For more, follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
 
Respect thanks for that ^^ I read the whole thing with great interest. This is something I am definitely getting and reading myself. I wonder what Paul will have to say about his responses at that time. He may have a different story now.

In this book it seems Paul introduced Michael to buying catalogs, but I heard in an interview the son of I think Johnson saying that it was his dad who influenced Michael to consider buying catalogs. (It is like Michael's dress, Latoya said she told him to wear one glove.)
 
Michael himself said that it's Paul who told him about buying catalogs.
 
Retweetet von Zack O. Greenburg
BORBAY @borbay · 9 h.

Spotted at @BNBuzz Union Square #michaelJacksonInc by @zogblog
BpJq0Z7IEAAaBGF.jpg:large



Retweetet von Diddy
Zack O. Greenburg @zogblog · 10 h.

“@MichaelJackson was one of the most intuitive, up-to-date artists there was.” - @IamDiddy in my MJ book http://mjinc.co #MJMondays
 
Last edited:
Lessons From The King Of Pop - AKA Michael Jackson


Michael McEvoy Interviews Michael Jackson Inc author Zack O'Malley Greenburg

Michael McEvoy DigDeepGrow.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHh0s6MWJUs


Streamed live on Jun 2, 2014 - 41 Minutes
What can you learn from the triumphs and tragedies of Michael Jackson? We all know about the sensational side of the pop icon, but how did he go about taking care of business? Find out as we welcome Zack Greenburg, author of Michael Jackson, Inc. The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of a Billion-Dollar Empire. Join us live... we'll be giving away a free copy of the book as well. #michaeljackson #michaeljacksoninc
 
Exclusive Michael Jackson Book Excerpt: In MJ's Shoes
http://www.vibe.com/article/exclusi...cerpt-rise-fall-rebirth-billion-dollar-empire

By Zack O’Malley Greenburg

50 Cent isn’t known for being giddy.

Born Curtis Jackson, the Queens native put himself on the hip-hop map with the 1999 hit “How to Rob,” in which he outlines his plans to relieve stars from Jay-Z to Will Smith of their cash. He rose to international superstardom after releasing Get Rich or Die Tryin’ in 2003; on the album’s cover, his face is contorted into a fierce scowl, perhaps a consequence of getting shot nine times at close range a few years earlier.

These days, he’s more concerned with entrepreneurial ventures (though he still keeps a framed photo of a pistol in his office, behind a gold placard that reads “CJ Enterprises”). He took home $100 million on a single deal in 2008—payment for a stake he’d taken in vitaminwater parent Glacéau in lieu of a one-off endorsement fee—when Coca-Cola bought the beverage company for $4.1 billion. He’s launched his own video games, record label, sneakers, clothes, headphones and energy shots.

Yet it still comes as something of a surprise when, a few minutes into an interview in his Manhattan penthouse office, he jumps up from his plush leather chair and begins bouncing around the room, gesturing with cartoonishly muscled forearms and smiling uncontrollably. The topic responsible for his good humor? Michael Jackson, the man whose early shoe and clothing lines helped open the door for the brand extensions of the next generation of entertainers, 50 Cent included.

“When he did ‘Billie Jean,’ I had that poster on my wall,” says the rapper. “Like, he could have sold me penny loafers . . . the showmanship that was involved in his presentation was so much more advanced than the things that we’d seen in the past.”

Long before 50 Cent created his G-Unit sneaker for Reebok or Jay-Z launched his S. Carter line, Nike had MJ.

To be clear, those initials don’t refer to the King of Pop, but Michael Jordan. In 1987, the Chicago Bulls legend became the first entertainer to be paid on a scale commensurate with today’s stars when he inked a seven-year, $18 million contract with Nike to launch his Air Jordan brand. The agreement marked the apotheosis of the rapidly growing athlete shoe deal, which was virtually nonexistent just ten years earlier.

In the 1970s, Nike’s first signing was University of Oregon track star Steve Prefontaine. He agreed to wear the fledgling company’s shoes for a then-whopping $5,000. The scales quickly shifted when Adidas signed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to a $100,000 deal in 1982; shortly thereafter, New Balance spent $1.2 million to lock up fellow basketball star James Worthy before Nike upped the stakes by another order of magnitude with Jordan; the company’s revenues soared from $10 million to just shy of $1 billion over that span.

Athletes were finally getting paid to wear shoes, but musicians didn’t begin to break into the market until Run-D.M.C. released the song “My Adidas,” an initially uncompensated ode to shell-toes. In 1986—after a handful of Adidas executives showed up to a Madison Square Garden show and witnessed some twenty thousand onlookers raise their own sneakers toward the rafters at the behest of the rappers—Run-D.M.C. signed a deal worth more than $1 million.

By 1990, upstart sneaker purveyor LA Gear was desperately looking to grab a bigger piece of a multibillion-dollar market. So the company’s chief, Robert Greenberg, turned to cofounder Sandy Saemann and said, “Let’s get Michael Jackson.”

Saemann, a loquacious Californian who later resigned from the company after amassing millions in stock holdings—and now runs a high-end hot dog stand in Manhattan Beach—thought this was a bad idea. Even without a big-name endorser, he believed LA Gear had a shot at eating into its rivals’ domestic market share.

The way he saw it, Michael Jackson’s image was still smarting from recent tabloid fiascoes and wouldn’t necessarily help sell sneakers in the United States. Greenberg saw things differently. Even if the singer couldn’t help with their domestic efforts, he was still huge overseas, as the Bad Tour had shown. If Jackson could sell over 4 million concert tickets—with more than half his tour dates occurring abroad—why couldn’t he move a million sneakers worldwide?

Thus began the relationship between Jackson and LA Gear. When Greenberg and Saemann finally reached out to his camp, they found the singer was amenable to doing a deal as long as his financial conditions were met: $20 million. That surpassed even the seven-year, $18 million Nike deal signed by Michael Jordan in 1987 (though the basketball legend would earn far more after receiving a royalty on every Air Jordan shoe sold). But Jackson knew his worth, even when it came to sneakers.

“He wanted it to be the biggest deal known to man,” recalls Saemann. “He was very conscious of where the scale was. . . . That’s the side of him that nobody understands. He knew where he was. He wanted to be number one and he wanted to stay number one, he wanted to be the largest entertainer with the most deals.”

During early conversations over the venture, Saemann and Greenberg told Jackson and his attorney John Branca, who was negotiating the deal, that they wanted to launch the shoe abroad only. That way, they figured, it wouldn’t be such a gamble. But Jackson refused. If he was going to launch his own sneaker, it had to be the biggest and the best—bigger even than Jordan’s—and there was no way he’d settle for an overseas-only deal.

LA Gear agreed, and Jackson accepted the offer of $20 million, about one-fifth of the company’s annual advertising budget, to help launch a line of co-branded sneakers that would be sold both in the US and around the world; he’d get half of that sum up front. The press release announcing the shoe would refer to him as the King of Pop, and his agreement with LA Gear would be described as “the largest entertainment endorsement ever made.”

In return, says Saemann, Jackson promised he’d shoot television commercials for LA Gear and wear the sneakers in the promotional materials for his upcoming album, Dangerous, which was supposedly almost finished. When Jackson showed up at a press conference in Los Angeles on August 6 to announce the agreement, it seemed a perfect match.

“The theme of our ad campaign is ‘unstoppable,’ ” said Saemann, introducing the singer. “This word epitomized what LA Gear and Michael Jackson represent. . . . I want to tell the competition, we’ll up you a Jackson.”

“Thank you very much,” said Jackson, looking spiffy as ever in sunglasses, a sleek dark suit, and a purple dress shirt. “I’m very happy to be a part of the LA Gear magic.”

Around the same time, Jackson hired a new manager, Sandy Gallin, who won the job after bonding with the King of Pop over the scope of their shared dream of making Jackson as big in the film world as he was in music.

“What he thought he could become and what I thought he could become were very similar,” says Gallin. “Michael thought of being the biggest, the best . . . to repeat the great success of Thriller and to be able to have more people attend your concerts, to be able to have the most successful short films at the time, to be able to do movies, and to succeed more than anyone else in any form of entertainment that he entered into, whether it was writing, producing, singing, acting, directing. It was innate to his personality.”

Despite the managerial changes, Jackson’s business career was chugging along at a healthy clip. To help promote Jackson’s shoe, Saemann directed a commercial that features the King of Pop spinning through a dark, steamy street in his new kicks. His face appears for only about three seconds toward the end when, after destroying a street lamp with the sheer force of his mojo, Jackson looks up to find a young girl smiling and clapping from an upstairs window.

Saemann and Jackson also developed a close working relationship. They’d go to record stores and sales meetings together; on one occasion, Jackson elevated the moods of seven hundred sales reps by dancing on a table. He and Saemann would even edit videos together late into the night. “He was no slouch,” recalls the former LA Gear executive. “When Michael went to work on something, it might take two weeks to get ahold of him, but he’d give you five hours.”

Jackson, however, still hadn’t completed his new album. Whenever Saemann broached the subject with Jackson, the response was the same.

“I’m a creative guy,” he’d say. “You can’t force it.”

In the end, LA Gear had to move forward with the launch of the sneaker line though neither the album nor the promised product tie-in had emerged. Retailers were expecting the shoes to be delivered on schedule—but they were also expecting the footwear to make an appearance in promotional material that accompanied Jackson’s new record. When that didn’t materialize, the results were disastrous. The shoes sold hundreds of thousands of pairs, says Saemann, but there were also hundreds of thousands that had to be returned to the manufacturer after languishing too long on the shelves.

Jackson hadn’t held up his end of the bargain, and LA Gear was suffering. The day Saemann introduced him at the press conference, the company’s stock stood at $20.75 per share, down from a high of $50.38 the previous year. By January 1991, the stock had plummeted to $2.88; it lost 21.5 percent on a single day, thanks to the announcement that the company expected to lose $4 million to $6 million in the fourth quarter. Jackson’s deal factored heavily into that figure.

In June of 1991, Saemann voluntarily resigned from the company “to pursue other business interests.” Roy A. Disney’s Trefoil Capital bought 30 percent of the slumping company around the same time. LA Gear would go on to sue Jackson in 1992; after the singer countersued, the two sides settled for an undisclosed sum. Saemann suspects the company let Jackson keep what they’d already paid him—the first half of the promised $20 million—but didn’t have to fork over anything more. And despite the damage to Saemann’s stock options and reputation, he still has some fondness for the singer.

“I enjoyed every minute around him; we talked as equals and friends,” recalls Saemann. “But, genius or not, he didn’t deliver.”

Back in 50 Cent’s office, the rapper is done pacing. Now he’s sitting down again, musing on his shared connections with Michael Jackson. There were plenty of those on the business front, given that the King of Pop proved it was possible for an entertainer to start his own clothing label, shoe line, and record company long before the birth of 50 Cent’s G-Unit empire.

But he connects with Jackson on another level. Right or wrong, many people define both men by their most successful album—Get Rich or Die Tryin’ was the rapper’s Thriller. Like Jackson, he had many other hits, but the album remained something of an albatross because of the inevitable comparisons it evoked whenever a new effort was released.

“[Reviewers] go, ‘Yeah it’s cool, but it’s not as good as it was when you came the first time,’ ” he explains. “And you can’t have a second chance at a first impression. No matter who you are.”

Despite spending more than a decade trying to top Get Rich, it’s still his bestselling album and most critically acclaimed. 50 Cent doesn’t seem too distressed, though; he’s turned his attention to new business ventures like his SMS headphone line and SK Energy drink.

The specter of success took a seemingly heavier toll on Michael Jackson. One need only consider how much time and money he spent on subsequent albums to see how badly he yearned to top Thriller—a perfectionist’s longing that caused him to drastically delay the launch of multiple works—sometimes at the expense of interconnected business ventures like the LA Gear shoe line.

He did all of this in an effort to achieve something that was, by definition, basically impossible: to make an album more successful than the most successful album of all time. And Jackson was spurred on over and over again by reviewers and listeners who continued to hold his work, both sonically and commercially, to the standard of Thriller.

“They just put you up against yourself,” says 50 Cent. “If they give you an opponent, you can analyze and figure out their weaknesses and beat them. But if it’s yourself, how do you win? How do you top that?”

Adapted from Michael Jackson, Inc.: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of a Billion-Dollar Empire, by Zack O’Malley Greenburg. The book will be published by Simon & Schuster in the U.S. on June 3.
 
Exclusive: 'Michael Jackson, Inc.' Author Analyzes Gloved One's Green
http://www.allmediany.com/articles/...n-inc039-author-analyzes-gloved-one039s-green

ALLMEDIANY: Cash became inseparable from his image, but did he intend to brand himself as a big spender, or had his income become colossal enough to consume his identity?

ZACK O’MALLEY GREENBERG: I think that M.J. early in his career was making so much money that it was almost like he couldn’t possibly spend it all. If you look at the earnings numbers – I did a whole thing where I did estimates for every single year of his career – and if you look into the 80s really and part of the 90s, he was making, adjusted for inflation, often well over $100 million a year, and I think he just became accustomed to that level of earnings, and a lot of times pulling in money where he didn’t even have to do anything, royalties or back-catalog stuff, or that kind of thing. So he was one of the most financially successful artists, if not the most financially successful artist of all time at the end of the day, and I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that it came through not just by some grand accident, but because he very carefully plotted his career from [a] business standpoint.

ALLMEDIANY: Can it be he branded himself as rich?

Z.O.G.: I don’t think he necessarily wanted to brand himself as the biggest earner, but he wanted to brand himself as the best in everything that he got into, whether it was being the best musician, the best music, the best-selling album – that was all part of the same set of ideas for him, and he was definitely into superlatives, so he certainly wanted to build the biggest publishing company in the world and have the best-selling record, and those are kind of goals that are more commercial in nature than some of his other goals, but I think it had less to do with money and wanting money, and more to do with striving to be the best.

ALLMEDIANY: He altered the entertainment business and exemplified how greatly artists could build themselves, but what did he do differently from forebears like Sly Stone, who the New York Post reported ended up living in his van in 2011?

Z.O.G.: I think throughout history there’ve been artists who’ve been taken advantage of by their managers or agents or record labels or lawyers, and it could be anything from just not knowing kind of the basics of the industry to [getting] swindled by somebody. If you look at even somebody like Elvis [Presley], whose manager took half of everything – standard manager’s cut is basically 10 percent these days, give or take, Elvis was giving away half. So I think a lot of entertainers early on were kind of naive, and they got talked into a lot of things that maybe they shouldn’t have been, and they sold off their publishing rights for nothing or things like that, or they didn’t take advantage of all of the opportunities that they could’ve. Maybe they toured a lot, but some of the things that M.J. got into, like buying other artists’ publishing catalogs or doing endorsement deals or having [his] own shoe line or clothing line ... these are things that weren’t necessarily available to other artists coming up, kind of the pre-1980s era, and Michael Jackson was the first to really kind of pioneer the idea of an artist as a mogul, and kind of flip the paradigm of musician as contractor on its head and had it be musician as owner, musician as mogul.

ALLMEDIANY: How arduous a challenge had it been to contact bigwigs appearing in the book?

Z.O.G.: Typically, you have to go through publicists or managers, somebody like that, but ... a lot of the people who I interviewed for the book were people who I had interviewed for my other book [Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office] or for Forbes, and I had a lot of the information all ready to contact them, and I think because I had interviewed a lot of the people in the past, they were much more amenable to talking to me and really opening up with some good stuff.

ALLMEDIANY: Although it’s been a long time that folks have clamored about gossip that he composed audio for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, after the interviewing you did for the book, can it confirm the legend?

Z.O.G.: It can confirm the legend. M.J. was behind the music of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and that’s one of the revelations, I think, in the book.

ALLMEDIANY: Are you the first to confirm the arrangement?

Z.O.G.: I haven’t actually seen it confirmed anywhere else, but I’ve seen rumors about it, so I thought, “Well, let me go and try to actually confirm this,” because I’d been talking to the people who would be able to do that, and sure enough, they said, “Yeah, he was behind that.” I think the rumor was that Michael Jackson had done the music for Sonic 3 and that Sega had taken his name off because it happened around the time the allegations hit, but basically what I heard was that [it was] the other way around, and that M.J. was such a perfectionist, and when he heard what the music sounded like coming out of tiny television speakers played through a very rudimentary audio card on the Genesis cartridge, he wasn’t happy with the way it sounded, and so he just wanted to take his name off of it.

ALLMEDIANY: Director John Landis attempted to give Thriller life as a short in theaters but discovered the clip had been airing all over once Jackson’s manager Frank DiLeo disseminated copies for broadcast, after which the director told AllMediaNY DiLeo “did the right thing for the record but he kind of screwed me.” Did the celebratory aspect of the book cause you to avoid bringing up additional examples of Jackson getting ahead at the expense of others?

Z.O.G.: No, I mean, this book could’ve been thousands of pages long. M.J. was involved in so many deals and so many great projects, and there are so many different angles from which to approach them. I think I really felt that I had to condense it into a readable length that wouldn’t kind of lose people in a labyrinth of deals and projects, and so at some point, I guess you stop following just the thread and you have to decide what to leave in and what to take out.

ALLMEDIANY: Are you cashing in on the anniversary of Jackson’s death by coming out with the book in June?

Z.O.G.: I think if I wanted to cash in, I would’ve picked a different profession. [Laughs] You try to put out books when there’ll be interest, and I think it’s very fortunate there are three big events this summer—you mentioned one of them, but also the [Xscape] album launch, and then Michael Jackson’s birthday in August is another one. So it seemed like summer would be a good time, and ultimately it was left to the publisher to put out whatever they wanted to, and this is the time frame they settled on.

ALLMEDIANY: Could he have avoided all the cash concerns he dealt with toward the end?

Z.O.G.: Yeah, I think one of the things about M.J., as shrewd of a businessman as he was at his height, and as brilliant an entertainer as he was, one of the things that ended up hurting him was something that was one of the best things about him, which was that he was a perfectionist, and I think it got to the point toward the end of his career that he’d become such a perfectionist that he hadn’t put out a new studio album since 2001 ... He hadn’t really toured actively since the HIStory tour, and the HIStory tour in the late 90s was his last big tour, and that was more than 10 years before he died. So if he’d continued to tour, if he’d continued to put out new music, I think that would’ve gone a long way toward helping relieve some of the issues that he had regarding liquidity.

ALLMEDIANY: What hindrances are there currently in the business that he’d have to endure?

Z.O.G.: Artists make a lot less money now on recorded music than they did—particularly superstars—did in the 80s and 90s, and really, it was just a tremendous engine for him economically ... but throughout the music industry, album sales are down, and although consumption is still high via streaming on YouTube, Spotify and Pandora, the [business] hasn’t quite caught up, and I think for him, he would’ve had to rely more on some of the outside-the-box business ventures, the kind that he did a lot during the 80s, but was definitely thinking about toward the end of his life, but hadn’t really been able to execute as well as he had earlier in his career, and those are the kinds of things that really drive earnings for superstars these days, guys like Jay-Z or Dr. Dre, Diddy, even somebody like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga. They have a lot of non-musical ventures that are earning them a lot of money too.

ALLMEDIANY: Can any acts now claim to continue the business acumen he began?

Z.O.G.: I mentioned Diddy and Jay-Z and Dr. Dre and 50 Cent. In hip hop a lot of the time, I think the most successful artists are ones who diversify their portfolio a little bit by having clothing lines and sneaker lines and things like that, and I really think that was a trend that Michael Jackson was instrumental in starting by launching his own LA Gear shoe line and having his clothing line and getting into music publishing, doing things that musicians specifically hadn’t done on that level before him.

ALLMEDIANY: Lines in his autobiography helped channel him into Michael Jackson, Inc., but did you have any inquiries he could’ve answered?

Z.O.G.: I think I would’ve asked him what stopped him from touring more or putting out music more frequently toward the end of his life. My feeling is, the answer is he didn’t think it was good enough, or that it wasn’t up to his incredibly exacting standards—but I would’ve been curious to hear what he said.
 
ALLMEDIANY: Lines in his autobiography helped channel him into Michael Jackson, Inc., but did you have any inquiries he could’ve answered?

Z.O.G.: I think I would’ve asked him what stopped him from touring more or putting out music more frequently toward the end of his life. My feeling is, the answer is he didn’t think it was good enough, or that it wasn’t up to his incredibly exacting standards—but I would’ve been curious to hear what he said.

You know ^^ he keeps saying his perfectionism was the reason he did not tour much or make many albums. I always filter in the effects of the allegations and media persecution which drained his spirit, emotions, energy, and his sleeping problems. If you are not at peace internally, how are you going to create good songs or get the motivation to create new music, dance, and even go on tour? I don't think perfectionism is the only thing that stood in his way. Also, I think in the beginning he deliberately spaced his album/touring activities. Later in life, I think external factors, like the allegations played a role. I guess Zack is a business/financial major, so these mental/emotional issues were not factored in. Also, he may not want to mention the media's culpability since he is a writer and needs the media.

I always hear other people say he wanted to top Thriller, but have any of you guys ever heard Michael say that? I am curious. I know the media and everyone who talks to him mention how something was not like Thriller, but when did Michael say it? I could see him saying such and such an album will sell XYZ amount.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top