Music Banter - Michael Jackson

Infographic: Michael Jackson's Multibillion Dollar Career Earnings, Listed Year By Year

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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 gaudy 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.”

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