{"id":329363,"date":"2025-08-09T01:49:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T01:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/329363\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T01:49:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T01:49:16","slug":"how-did-michael-jackson-come-to-own-3-million-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/329363\/","title":{"rendered":"How did Michael Jackson come to own 3 million songs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Michael<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Matthew Rolston \/ Epic Records)<\/p>\n

Fri 8 August 2025 18:00, UK <\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take a rocket scientist to see why Michael Jackson<\/a> was one of the biggest musicians of all time. <\/p>\n

From his countless hits to his God-given voice, hardly anything he did on the stage was anything less than perfect. However, the reason he became one of the wealthiest pop stars had more to do with the songs he had under his belt.<\/p>\n

Then again, that doesn\u2019t mean that Jackson was the most prolific artist in the world by any means. He had already been part of the Jackson Five machine for the first years of his life, but when he started his solo career, he was more concerned with quality over quantity, usually releasing one long album with consistently great pop songs rather than throwing out the odd promotional single here and there. <\/p>\n

Even if his albums sold in droves from Thriller onward<\/a>, \u2018The King of Pop\u2019 was playing the long game. He had already wanted to outsell Thriller when Bad by setting his goal at 100million records, but when that fell short, he figured the next best thing for him was to get into music publishing. After all, nothing earns more money than song copyright, and Jackson wasn\u2019t willing to go for the obscure artists he listened to when he was a kid.<\/p>\n

He knew to aim high when acquiring songwriting royalties, but after buying out Sony Music Publishing in 1985, it wasn\u2019t simply a handful of tunes. He had over 3million songs at his disposal, which was bound to create a few dust-ups amongst his musical friends when they found out \u2018The King of Pop\u2019 owned every piece of music they made.<\/p>\n

How much did Michael Jackson own with Sony Music Publishing?<\/p>\n

While Jackson first got the idea of getting into music publishing from Paul McCartney, the former Beatle didn\u2019t realise what Jackson was aiming for. Even though Jackson seemed to be joking when talking about acquiring The Beatles\u2019 music, the Sony deal gave him the rights to use any Beatles song he wanted, which led to friction between him and McCartney that existed for decades.<\/p>\n

But The Beatles were simply a drop in the bucket of the iconic stars that Jackson had the rights to at that point. Nearly any genre you can think of was part of this deal, with Jackson acquiring the rights to Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, Kate Bush, and even heavyhitters today like Taylor Swift. So while every Swiftie was singing along to songs like \u2018Love Story\u2019 back in the day, just remember that they were putting money into Jackson\u2019s pockets that whole time.<\/p>\n

Curiously, though, Jackson never seemed to use any of the songwriting royalties to serve his own career. Whereas most people would want to use The Beatles\u2019 music for whatever they wanted, the only notable moves Jackson made with their music were a token cover of \u2018Come Together\u2019<\/a> on his album HIStory and using \u2018Revolution\u2019 in a car commercial. <\/p>\n

While Jackson\u2019s estate eventually lost the rights to Sony Music Publishing in 2016, the fact that they let one of the leading stars in pop music have that many songs under his belt is the kind of power no one should wield. For as much as labels might be considered money-hungry every time they try to suck any profit out of their artists, Jackson\u2019s songwriting deals could have practically financed a third-world country if he wanted to. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Matthew Rolston \/ Epic Records) Fri 8 August 2025 18:00, UK It doesn\u2019t take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329364,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[77,31706,269,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-329363","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-michael-jackson","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114996298719559092","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}