Michael Jackson's "Thriller" Hits The 30 Million Mark

There are some classic albums that continue to sell years, even decades, after their release. The Beatles Abbey Road, Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, and The Eagles Hotel California come to mind, but the album that tops all of them is Michael Jackson's Thriller which has just reached the 30 million mark in the US, according the RIAA.

Released in 1982, the album helped lift the music industry from a recession, and has gone on to sell over 100 million copies world-wide.

The album also spent a record setting 37 weeks on top of the Billboard 200 album charts.

While Adele has had some impressive numbers with both her 21 (over 30 million worldwide), and 25 (5 million in the US so far) albums, it's fairly certain that we won't see an album with the sales legs of Thriller again, at least until another consumer-attractive physical format emerges.

It's a different music delivery world that we live in today, so the real numbers to watch are the number of streams and views that an album gets. You know you have a huge hit Thriller-like hit when you hit a billion, as Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber (among a few others) have found out.

That said, Thriller remains a stellar work that still holds up well today. It's the work of a lifetime that captures lightening in a bottle. About the only thing that doesn't work (at least for me) is the cover, which seems disconnected from the album title.

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The 5 Most Expensive Music Videos Of All Time

Once upon a time music video budgets were almost like TV movie budgets in that directors took advantage of the record label's largess and went for the best of everything available. Today that's all changed as music video budgets have decreased quite a but due to the ever falling fortunes of the music business, but also because the basic costs of gear has fallen so low as well.

That said, there are 5 music videos that totally stand out from the crowd as the most expensive ever created. Surprisingly, all 5 are divided between only two artists - Michael Jackson and Madonna. Here they are in decreasing order in today's dollars adjusted for inflation.

5. "Black or White" - Michael Jackson - $6.9 million. 11 minutes long and premiered on all the music channels at the same time all over the world with an estimated audience of 500 million!

4. "Bedtime Story" - Madonna - $7.7 million. Surprisingly, this was not one of her bigger hits.

3. "Die Another Day" - Madonna - $7.9 million. The James Bond inspired video was the best selling dance song of 2002-2003 and nominated for a Grammy.

2. "Express Yourself" - Madonna - $9.4 million. The most expensive video ever made up until that time (1989).

1. "Scream" - Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson - $10.7 million. It won a Grammy and 64 million people watched when it debuted on ABC's Primetime Live show.

They don't make them like that anymore, and we should all be thankful.

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Top 10 Dead Earning Musicians

The legacy of many star musicians still continues to bring in the cash as seen by this top 10 dead earning musicians list, according to ConcertTour.org.

Once again, Michael Jackson tops the list, although one has to wonder how much money actually made it to his heirs since his earnings are still being used to pay off the massive debts he piled up during his lifetime.

Kurt Cobain's estate earned a surprising $50 million last year, while Elvis, John Lennon and Bob Marley continue to earn well and round out the top 5. Here's the top 10.

1. Michael Jackson - 160 million last year
2. Kurt Cobain - $50 million
3. Elvis - $42 million
4. John Lennon - $24 million
5. Bob Marley - $18 million
6. George Harrison - $7 million
7. Johnny Cash - $6 million
8. Richard Rodgers - $6 million
9. Ray Charles - $6 million
10. Jenni Rivera - $6 million

The above earnings show why it's so important to protect your legacy. It's a way to keep your family living well long after you're gone.

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Sometimes Big Promo Doesn't Work

More and more, music mass marketing is working less and less. This is especially true for television, where once upon a time, an appearance on a popular show could mean a huge jump in sales. Take for instance an appearance on Saturday Night Live, which could mean at least 100,000 in sales; sometimes even more back in the good old days of limited media. This is becoming less and less the case however, as we get further into Music 3.0 where consumer's listening, watching and buying habits are dictated by the time they spend online.

Probably the best example of how little impact television can have came recently with the airing of Spike Lee's documentary of the making of Michael Jackson's Bad. This was basically a 90 minute commercial for the re-issue of the album during prime time of one of the best television viewing nights of the year, and it sold only 11,000 albums the next week as a result.

Let's go over that again - Michael Jackson, big album, Thanksgiving evening, 11k!

The worse thing is that it was a really great program, showing another side of Michael that few have ever seen, along with much of the backstory of the making of a big-selling album. Granted,  the record is 25 years old and MJ's music isn't currently hot, but it would have been interesting to see if a similar show on Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga (or even Psy for that matter) would've done any better. Maybe a bit, but I doubt it.

Several things are changing at once here. Television is losing it's impact, and people are getting more used to subscription music instead of buying it. I bet a lot of the audience that were motivated to listen to MJ afterwards just fired up Spotify or Pandora or Grooveshark or ..........

The fact of the matter is that I think more copies of Bad might've been sold with an online marketing campaign, and it would've been a  lot cheaper.

The estate of MJ no doubt made some big dollars from the network, but the show just proved that we're in a state of evolution in all media. Hang on for ride!

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The 6 Top Earning Dead Musicians For 2012

Forbes recently posted an article about the top 6 earning dead musicians that I found interesting in a number of ways, particularly who was on the list and who was not. Let's look at them:

1. Michael Jackson - $145 million. A full year after he died, Michael has sold more than 8 million albums in the US, more than twice what runner-up Taylor Swift has done. His 50% stake in the Sony/ATV publishing catalog will continue to throw off cash pretty much forever, and his Cirque Due Soleil show already grossed $160 million on only the first leg of its tour. This number won't go down much in the near future.

2. Elvis Presley - $55 million. Believe it or not, the King's revenues were flat this year, yet he still continues to be a goldmine in the afterlife.

3. Bob Marley - $17. In death he's bigger than in life, at least revenue-wise, having sold more than 75 million records since 1992 alone. Now that the reggae king has added an energy drink and lifestyle company to his brands portfolio, expect this revenue to climb in the future.

4.  John Lennon - $12 million. The Beatles have sold more that 62 million albums in the US alone since 1992, and the Love Cirque Du Soleil show continues to be a big hit.

5. Richard Rogers - $6 million. Rogers and Hammerstein vast catalog of show tunes continue to be standards, and their publishing throws off cash accordingly.

6. George Harrison - $5.5 million. As with Lennon, GH still gets a cut of The Beatle empire as well as publishing from perennial favorites "Here Comes The Sun" and "Something."

What's interesting is who didn't make the list. Whitney Houston never wrote her songs so there's no publishing income, plus she never made back her last $40 million label advance, so no income there. Jimi Hendrix, Les Paul and Tupac Shakur all pulled in a bit more than $3 million, which somehow seems low. That said, it just goes to show that some celebrities can truly live forever, at least financially.

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The EMI Publishing Deal Is Now Complete

As EMI winds down from being a major record label, thereby taking the number of majors from 4 to 3, the first part of the deal is now complete. An investor group led by Sony/ATV Publishing now brings the famous and powerful EMI Music Publishing under its wing.

The group, which includes the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, Jynwel Capital of Hong Kong, Blackstone's GSO Capital Partners, the estate of Michael Jackson and mogul David Geffen, paid $2.2 billion to purchase EMI Publishing, which appears to be a pretty good deal. EMI Publishing has long been considered the jewel of the industry, with a catalog of 1.3 million songs including classics like "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and "New York, New York," as well as songs by The Beatles, The Police, The Beach Boys, Kenye West, Alica Keys, Justin Beiber and many other superstars.

Terms dictated by the Jackson Estate stipulate that EMI Music Publishing still remains as a separate company, which is all well and good, but it's still under the same conglomerate umbrella.

Isn't this country supposed to have anti-trust laws to prevent major consolidation like this? It's not only a bad idea for one company to have such a large market share (well over 30%), but it's bad for the writers too. With that many songs to administer, it's too easy to fall between the cracks.

This is just another indication of how badly the music business needs a major reset, even more so than we're seeing today.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

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Michael Jackson Still Raking In The Dough

Superstars never really die, they're estates just get richer. That's certainly the case with Michael Jackson, who was on the edge of bankruptcy at the time of his death. Now two years later his estate has collected a huge amount of income, and is poised to make still more in the coming years.

Billboard Magazine reported in June 2010 that the Jackson estate had generated over a $1 billion in the year since his death. The revenue was generated by a combination of music sales ($429 million), film/TV revenue ($392 million), music publishing ($130 million), licensing ($35 million) and a $31 million recording contract. That was a year ago, so the figures are even gaudier today. How did this happen? Consider this:

• According to Box Office Mojo, Jackson's posthumous concert film, "This Is It," has grossed more than $72 million to date domestically and $189 million in foreign markets for a worldwide take over more than $261 million. It ranks as the #2 music documentary of all-time behind Justin Bieber's "Never Say Never." The film has also generated nearly $45 million in DVD sales in the U.S. 

• There have been 2 posthumous albums  released since Michael's death in June 2009. Last year's Michael has sold just over 510,000 copies to date, while the This Is It collection has moved nearly 1 million copies to date in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan, remarkable numbers considering the state of the music business and the economy. Then in May, Jackson lodged his first #1 on the Billboard magazine Dance/ Club Play Songs chart in 16 years with the latest single from his posthumous Michael album, "Hollywood Tonight." 

• Michael has sold more than 16 million digital tracks since June 28, 2009, the first sales week following his passing, according to Nielsen SoundScan. To put that in perspective, from the time Nielsen began counting digital tracks in 2004 until the week before Jackson's death, the singer had sold just over 8.1 million digital tracks, a figure that has doubled in just the past two years. 

• The Jackson estate is making anywhere from $25 million to $50 million per year thanks to his stake in the half-million-song Sony/ATV publishing catalog, which includes titles by Elvis, Lady Gaga, Eminem, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan. 

• There have been more than 3 million copies sold of the Ubisoft's "Michael Jackson: The Experience" video game worldwide. 

Considering that there will soon be two Cirque du Soleil shows (one permanently set in Las Vegas and the other travelling), it looks like Michael Jackson will continue to be a hot property for some years to come. For more interesting figures on MJ's sales, check out this MTV story.

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The History Of The Music Video

I have a book coming out next year called The Musician's Video Handbook that gives a musician all the tools he needs to create any number of videos that are now integral to an artist or band's career.

Here's an excerpt from chapter 1 that traces the history of the music video.
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Music with picture goes back a lot further than you might think. With the arrival of the synchronized film sound in 1926, many bands, vocalists and dancers of the era were viewed as excellent demonstration content for the new medium and featured in short musical films by the Vitaphone company. Then in 1932, in what was perhaps the first music video, blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called St. Louis Blues which featured a dramatized performance of the hit song. Moving into the 1940’s, musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs that also foreshadowed many of today’s performance-style music videos.

In the 60’s, music videos started to become more experimental. One of the premier prime-time television shows of the time was “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” that frequently featured the guitar playing and singing son of Ozzie and Harriet, Ricky Nelson. In a departure from the typical performance video where the artist played to the camera, patriarch Ozzie Nelson directed and edited the video of the Ricky’s hit song "Travelin' Man" and featured images of various parts of the world cut into the performance. This was certainly not even worth a second thought by today’s standards, but it was groundbreaking at the time. I can remember thinking how distracting those images were when I watched it back then, but the video was the precursor of things to come.

One of the earliest directed performance clips was the promo film made by The Animals for their breakthrough 1964 hit "House Of The Rising Sun", which was filmed in a studio on a specially-built set and featured an edited sequence of tracking shots, close-ups and long-shots, as singer Eric Burdon, guitarist Hilton Valentine and bassist Chas Chandler walked around the set in a series of choreographed moves. Heavy stuff for the time!

We’ll put the breakthrough feature films by The Beatles and others aside, since this book is focused on every kind of video a musician needs except making a feature film, but it should be noted that the Fab Four used video to their full advantage even back then. In 1965, The Beatles began making promotional clips (then known as "filmed inserts") for distribution and broadcast in other countries so they could promote their record releases without having to make in-person appearances. At the same time, The Byrds began using the same idea to promote their singles in the United Kingdom, starting with the 1965 single "Set You Free This Time". After seeing the success of this strategy, the floodgates opened and just about every popular group of the time including The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, The Who, Procol Harem, and even The Carpenters all did several videos of selected hits. In the late 60’s, Motown records was one of the first record labels to see the advantages of having video of their acts, with all of their artists making several clips available as needed for the various dance shows of the era like American Bandstand.

But music videos were changing. Instead of limiting themselves to strictly performance videos, many acts began to explore the abstract, led by the major acts at the time, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. The monochrome 1966 clip for Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" shows Dylan standing in a city back alley, silently shuffling a series of large cue cards bearing key words from the song's lyrics in time to the music while his underground celebrity friends Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth converse in the background (the cue-card device has since been imitated in numerous music videos). Then in 1967, the clips for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" took the promotional film format to a new level as they used techniques borrowed from avant-garde films such as reversed and slow motion, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and color filtering added in post-production. As with their music, the Fab Four felt the need to break from the traditional manner of production and tried to depict a narrative or plot instead of strictly performance.

By the end of the 70’s, everyone was getting into the act, as even cult groups like The Residents and Devo (who’s videos actually helped them break out to mass appeal) found it useful to produce their own videos. Bands like the Swedish group ABBA continued to use promotional videos of their songs with great success instead of touring (although they eventually did one brief tour of the States).

But music videos were about to be taken to another level as ex-Monkee guitarist Michael Nesmith began to consider video an integral part of the music and composed both music and the video at the same time. This conceptual leap became Elephant Parts, which was the first video album and first winner of a Grammy for music video. That being said, the biggest evolution in the marriage of video and music was about to come.

The atomic bomb of change in music video came with the arrival of MTV in 1981, but not many know that we have the evolution of technology to thank for its sudden surge in popularity. If it wasn’t for the fact that cable TV became widely available at that time, and the arrival of fairly affordable videotape recording and editing equipment (everything was shot on film to this point), the music video revolution wouldn’t have been nearly as rapid or bombastic. Suddenly there was an outlet that focused exclusively on the promotional video, and both MTV and their music fans couldn’t get enough of them. Almost overnight, MTV became a powerful force in the music industry, launching or propelling the careers of superstar acts like Madonna, Culture Club, Peter Gabriel, Dire Straits, Queen, and The Police, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the major record labels.

But perhaps the most dramatic event for both MTV and music video occurred in 1983, when the most successful and influential music video of all time was released, the nearly 14-minute-long video for Michael Jackson's song "Thriller." While the video set new standards for production (produced and directed by film maker John Landis at a reported cost of $500,000), Thriller, along with earlier videos by Jackson for his songs "Billie Jean" and "Beat It", was instrumental in getting music videos by African American artists played on MTV. Up until that time, the network’s content was centered squarely on rock. MJ made it not only acceptable for black music to be played on the network, but set the stage for the hip-hop revolution that it would help propel into the mainstream. 

Many critics of MTV and the music industry feel that music changed for the worse as the network’s viewership grew and the videos became ever more sophisticated. Because MTV had become so important in breaking an act, the major labels began to look for artists with a well-honed image and good looks that translated well to TV, while the emphasis on the music became less of a concern. Perhaps this kind of thinking eventually led to the fact that the subsequent “hit” artists became less unique and more homogenized as constant video viewing was no longer the attraction that it was when MTV debuted. In order to maintain or even increase its viewership, MTV slowly morphed into a lifestyle channel for the young, today rarely playing videos at all.

You’d think that with a major distribution outlet like MTV virtually out of the market videos would have a diminished importance, but today video music has become an essential element in the modern musician’s arsenal of tools. With the rise of the Internet, an artist has more video distribution avenues than ever before thanks to sites like YouTube (and about 250 sites like it), music and video blogs, various social networks, and the artist’s own website. If used properly, a video can even be far more important for outreach and connection to fans than any other artist to fan communication method ever used before. Where once upon a time an occasional video was reserved as promotion for a hit by a best-selling act, video is now an integral part of the game plan of any serious musician now that the costs of production are so low and there are so many avenues for distribution. 

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2009 Music Sales At An All-Time High

Yes, you read the title correctly. 2009 US music sales hit an all time high according to Nielsen SoundScan, with total sales of over 1.5 billion, up 2.1% over 2008.

Despite reports of the album's demise, the format sold 373.9 million (which is still a very substantial figure), but individual digital track sales are even better with more than 1.1 billion in 2009, up 8.3% from 2008 .

Nielsen also reports that 89 digital songs exceeded the 1 million sales mark in 2009, compared with 71 songs in 2008. Not only that, 2009 marked the first time a song broke the 4 million sales mark in a single year, which happened by not one, but four singles -- "Boom Boom Pow" and "I Got a Feeling" from the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" and Flo Rida's "Right Round."

Sounds pretty good doesn't it? But the devil is in the details. Of course the number of sales were up, but that doesn't mean revenue was as well, and industry growth is definitely slowing. Album sales dropped another 12.7% from the previous year, which is not a figure that the industry wants to hear, but digital music is still on the rise as it accounted for 40% of all music purchases in 2009, up from 32% in 2008. That being said, digital album sales made up 20% of total album sales in 2009.

Who was the biggest seller of 2009? Michael Jackson, who racked up a total of 8.2 million album sales, which was significantly more than Taylor Swift's 4.6 million. After Jackson and Swift, The Beatles moved more than 3.28 million total units, followed by newcomer Susan Boyle (3.1 million), Lady Gaga (2.8 million), Andrea Bocelli (2.6 million), Michael Buble (2.28 million), Eminem (2.1 million), Carrie Underwood (1.8 million) and the Black Eyed Peas (1.88 million).

Lady Gaga was the year's top-selling digital artist, selling more than 15 million tracks and her album "The Fame" being the top-selling digital album of the year with 461,000 downloads.

What can we take from these figures? Music is still extremely popular and although it's a business in decline, it's still enormous. Of course it's changing, but it's not going away any time soon.