Paper Industry News
Michael Jackson Stacks Paper From The Grave
Friday, 25, June 2010
If you walked into Hollywood's Amoeba Music in early June last year and asked for the Michael Jackson section, someone would have pointed you to a small selection of Jackson music that was dwarfed by Amoeba's hipper inventory: world music, hip-hop, jazz. It wasn't quite like asking for Barry Mainlow, but almost.Then Jackson died on June 25 and literally within an hour of the news rocketing around Los Angeles, things changed: "We put everything out and every single copy of everything good just sold within the hour," says Daniel Tures, Amoeba's manager.
Even the repackaged Jackson stuff that had languished on the shelves just vanished."It's cynical to say it, but death can be a very good career move," says Steve Pond, who writes for The Wrap.com, an online daily that reports on the entertainment industry.Pond noted that several sources have estimated Jackson's posthumous sales to be in the neighborhood of $1 billion.It's a comeback that has restored Jackson to the powerful peak he enjoyed in the '80s, when albums like Off The Wall and Thriller revived the flagging music industry -— and made consumers far less resistant to making the transition to the compact disc.
