The Michael Jackson estate has signed a contract extending its relationship with Sony Music as the Jackson economic juggernaut continues to generate tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
Even in a time of declining sales, the songs of Jackson, who died June 25, 2009, still generates over a million track downloads a year for the last three years running, while his album catalog still moves over 500,000 units annually. Moving over to streaming, so far this year’s Jackson music has been played 1.05 billion times, of which 443 million were audio streams and 608 million were video streams. Since Nielsen Music began tracking streaming, Jackson’s music has generated 3.1 billion streams, 1.2 billion in audio and 1.9 million in video. The audio streams alone translate into nearly 800,000 album consumption units.
The signing not only continues a nearly 40-year relationship since Jackson released his Epic debut, Off the Wall in 1979, but also extends the landmark deal signed with the estate after the singer’s death in 2010 that provided for the estate to reach up to $250 million in advances and other payments for about 10 recordings. Since then, four albums have been released, Michael, Immortal, Escape, and Scream which combined have scanned 1.29 million units; this is on top of the 1.8 million units that 2009’s This Is It has generated since its release.
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