Posthumous Jackson CD Releases and How They May Affect the Music Industry

At this time 25 years ago, every pop artist in existence had to worry about strategizing a release of their new album around a new release by Michael Jackson. Considering Jackson's "Thriller" album occupied #1 on the Billboard Top 200 for seemingly a century, most of 1983 and 1984 had major artists trying to find ways to break through the MJ force field to little effect. That usually meant delaying other releases for sometimes up to months in advance just to have a chance to capture the #1 position. Fortunately, Jackson took four years in-between albums or the music industry would have been reeling from a dearth of other #1's to list in the record books.

But that potential scenario is microcosmic compared to Michael Jackson in death. Now that Jackson is unsurprisingly iconic in death, expect all posthumous releases to be close to "Thriller" territory all over again.

And reports are that plenty of unreleased material, including that final rehearsal footage for his London show, is going to be released sooner rather than later. The reason, of course, is something called money--just as it was with Elvis where probably more posthumous albums have been released since his death in '77 than albums produced when he was alive. You can count on special gift set releases aplenty over the next ten to twenty years that recycle Jackson's previous hits as well as the above-mentioned unheard material stuffed in one of his secret vaults somewhere.

All of this is going to reshape the music industry after a recent time when no artist of late has dominated and every one gets a grab at the #1 slot. With numerous high-profile releases coming out in the fall and beyond, would any new posthumous Jackson release on CD or DVD end up reshaping the release dates of some of the most anticipated albums this year by other artists?

Perhaps most of those artists will just gladly capitulate to the Jackson onslaught on the charts once never-before-seen or heard material gets released to the faithful fans. In the music business, though, going to #1 is the equivalent to winning an Oscar for an actor: It's everything or nothing. Especially when there's so many high-profile music releases coming in the latter half of 2009, the specter of Michael Jackson may mean unprecedented delays or just some highly-anticipated releases getting shoved in the corner by the media.

It doesn't necessarily mean those who stand to profit the most from Jackson will release rush job albums by fall. Although don't necessarily count it out when the momentum is already at fever pitch over seeing or hearing anything new with MJ's stamp on it. However, when you see what's being released just in September by other artists, the thought of chaos erupting with a concurrent Michael Jackson release in play can't help but cross one's dazed mind.
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Whitney Houston, alone, has a new release this fall that will perhaps put her back in contention as one of pop music's greatest performers. You also have in September, ironically, all the original Beatles albums being re-released in remastered form for the first time since the 80's. Since Houston and Paul McCartney knew and worked with Michael Jackson, there seems to be a bit of a strange design there should Jackson be competing posthumously. Maybe the Beatles albums won't garner quite as much media blabber as Whitney Houston's comeback album. Yet every single person interested in music would expect at least Houston's album to hit #1 on the Billboard 200 as representative that the populace remember her as a true artist.

It's not just Houston who could be jostling for the #1 slot this fall. You also have Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Adam Lambert, Kris Allen, Katharine McPhee and Mariah Carey all with major releases that have good bets for going to the #1 position in their first week of release. What happens, then, if more than one Jackson release is out there by the time all these artists release their albums?

Don't be surprised to see a lot of shuffling around of release dates at the last minute to avoid the Jackson tsunami. If you go by the entire Top Ten in music on Amazon.com being dominated by Jackson's past albums as of this writing, it's not out of the question to see several posthumous Jackson releases competing with one another and taking up the Top Five spots on Billboard. That leaves all of the above artists in a situation where the media can and will give them short shrift as what happened to Farrah Fawcett when she passed away the same day Jackson did.

Having that happen doesn't seem possible considering the caliber of those other artists. We're about to find out, though, that Jackson has as much profound push with the media than any other human being alive or dead, except for maybe Barack Obama. Yes, that kind of profundity gets a little eerie when it can affect the entire music industry as just a starter.

If you're reading this by the time all of that chaos on the music charts happens, I'll assume you didn't see every single one of the above artists put their albums on indefinite hold because of multiple Jackson releases dominating the charts. But as with all things that dominate, there's always a time of receding. After all, a lot of artists eventually thrived after "Thriller" went out of contention in the mid 80's. And Jackson's album sales started to overall wane considerably the last few years until the power of death brought them back to unfathomable prominence.

By that time, the power of death for certain icons was an active process by the populace to play catch-up for not showing appreciation during the artist's life. It's nevertheless a situation that can't be denied, whether you can blame some of it or not on power of suggestion.

Because Jackson's icon status in death may exceed Elvis's, don't count out media beyond music being affected in release date strategy. Myriad Jackson DVD's are also going to be released sooner rather than later, which means a long-awaited movie arriving on DVD will have to settle for #2 if not much lower. That is, unless the King of Pop managed to force all his coattail-riding royal subjects to move all their wares to an entirely separate and unknown year where a fair and balanced music industry can happen once again.