1) How much is Sony/ATV worth?

It’s been pretty much boilerplate for the media to say that Sony/ATV, the massive publishing company Michael Jackson owned part of, was worth $1 billion. As Hitsville noted the other day, the NY Times has reported that Sony had $300 million in loans to Jackson leveraged against half of his 50 percent stake in the company, which would make it worth $1.2 billion.

Now, the AP is reporting that the company is worth $2 billion! That’s a pretty meteoric growth in value. Shouldn’t some reporter somewhere make it clear what the parameters of the company are and what it’s worth?

… and, incidentally, how it makes its money. You’d think, with the radio industry going down the tubes, the publishing industry would at least be in a state of statsis, despite the rise of internet music play. There’s income to be had from commercials, too of course, but I would assume that Sony/ATV’s prize holdings, the Lennon-McCartney songbook, is subject to a complex field of permissions before those songs make such appearances (The only one I can think of recently is “Hello Goodbye” in a Target ad) that make it fairly difficult to monetize.

2) How many records did Michael Jackson sell?

Thriller, we’re told, sold 100 million albums; Jackson sold 750 million total. Both of those figures strain credulity.

Thriller sold about 20 million copies in the U.S. in the first two years after its release … and since then has managed to sell only about 300,000 a year, on average. That’s not nothing; the 28 million it boasts now is impressive; and lord knows Jackson is popular overseas. But it’s hard to believe he sold more than twice as many copies of it outside the U.S.

There are of course a lot of artists who do better overseas than they do in the U.S.; but they’re not as big as Jackson was. I’d be happy to be disabused of this belief by someone in a position to know who could testify that his sales patterns were indeed so disproportionately offshore. But since there’s no systematic accounting of overseas sales in any case, you have to figure his camp is taking advantage of that gray area to promulgate the number. But that doesn’t excuse the media from reporting the figure so unskeptically.

Speaking of which, I assume this bogus figure comes from Jackson, who learned early at Motown that it was OK to out-and-out lie to the press about anything and everything. (If it came from Sony it would raise immediate questions from the Jackson camp about royalties, right?)

On the other hand, if the figure isn’t a mindless bit of misinformation, the only basis for it I can think of is that it is a hazy amalgamated estimate of all related Thriller sales—i.e., from the original album plus worldwide sales of the seven hit singles, which might indeed total close to 100 million.

As for the 750 million figure, that’s even more outlandish. Again, I’d be happy to hear from a Sony sales expert who could make this case, but it’s hard to imagine how that figure could be close to reality. Jackson had but seven album releases as an adult; even if Thriller did sell 100 million copies, which it didn’t, it’s by far Jackson’s biggest selling release. Off the Wall, Bad and Dangerous were big albums as well, but even if you want to make the generous case that all of Jackson’s other albums each sold twice as much overseas as they did in the U.S. that gets you only to a total of 200 million.

And even if he sold five million copies each of his biggest 20 hit singles, which he didn’t, that’s only 300 million.

As for the Jackson 5, remember that their heyday lasted for all of 18 months in a much smaller world.

Motown never participated in the record-industry auditing that allowed for RIAA sales certifications, for obvious reasons. But back then, a very big single might go “gold,” which meant sales of a million. (It doesn’t get mentioned much, but remember that, as single sales trended downward in the 1980s, the RIAA quietly reduced the gold qualification number to 500,000 copies.) The Jackson Five had five or six big hits and three or four fairly big albums—and, over some 40 years of catalog sales, moved some significant numbers of albums, cassettes, 8-tracks and CDs for the Motown repackaging operation.

And finally, as a child solo star Michael hit with “Ben,” and the post Motown Jacksons had a few hits, too.

But 450 million in sales’ worth? Hardly.

Yesterday, the position of the Jackson family was that Michael Jackson died without a will. They could hold that belief, and tell a court that, by the simple expedient of holding their hands to their ears and saying “blah blah blah” if anyone mentioned the news reports saying that Jackson’s sometime attorney, John Branca, had a will, dating from 2002.

Now Branca has produced it, and given the family a copy of it. The details haven’t been fully released yet, but CNN says it makes Branca and someone named John MacLaine, described as a “longtime friend” of Jackson, co-executors.

This disrupts the Jackson family’s desire to control Jackson’s estate, so now they’re looking around for a later will, one that would supplant Branca’s.

The family’s lawyers, who just told a judge that there wasn’t a will, spent most of this evening talking on CNN, telling anyone who’d listen that there just might be another one floating around.

They had no evidence of one, but that didn’t stop them from using every opportunity they could to speak skeptically about Branca. The best part of the evening was when two of the lawyers, Burt Levitch and Londell McMillan, tried to squirm out of the reality that, for now, Branca & Co. have the upper hand:

LEVITCH: [M]y concern is [Branca] may not have the full picture. There’s certainly a possibility that he was involved at one point and, as I said it earlier, in response to a question, things were in transition often in Michael’s life.

KING: [Londell], they’re saying though that they’re his attorneys now, as I read that.

MCMILLAN: Well, John Branca has been with Michael Jackson from ‘80 till about ‘96.

KING: And then wasn’t?

MCMILLAN: And there was a break. And I understand recently from Mr. Branca that he was just recently brought on a week ago.

KING: Oh, he told you that?

MCMILLAN: Mr. Branca told me and others. I want to put it in context. There’s a long history and a legacy that they have had. There was a separation for quite some time. Apparently, Mr. Branca had the will in his safe. So one of the issues that we’ll have to explore is, are the individuals named in the will still the people that Mr. Jackson wanted to administer and control his life after he passed and moved on?

I don’t understand why they went on CNN. They weren’t speaking officially for the family and, for example, couldn’t answer any of the questions King or Anderson Cooper had about talk of a large Jackson memorial service this weekend at the Neverland Ranch. Since the real decisions about control of the Jackson estate are going to be made by a judge, what did it gain the Jacksons to have them out in public mumbling darkly about John Branca?

Michael Jackson’s parents are asserting that the singer died without a will, according to this AP story. This contradicts other reports that Jackson did have a will, which was in the possession of John Branca, his sometime attorney.

Since stories to that effect have already been published, it seems like his parents are at once, trying to slip one past the judge, or, if that fails, daring Branca to come forward. Jackson went to great lengths to keep his nutty family away from his affairs during his lifetime; it will be a cruel irony if, in his addled state, he didn’t take care to prevent them from getting their hands on it after his untimely death.

On the other hand, at least one report I’ve read said that at least one of his trusts had his mother as a trustee.

Ashleigh Banfield was just an hors d’oeuvre; now those of us looking for some heavy meat-and-potatoes farcical nourishment have the emergence of Joe Jackson to savor.

The man by all accounts beat his children with a creativity notable even by the standards of the day—Michael Jackson famously told Oprah that he could vomit with fear at the sound of his dad’s approach. And like most of the rest of the members of the family—Janet definitely and, I don’t know, Rebbe perhaps might be exceptions—he managed to get himself into embarrassing and grasping situations as he tried to make money off his most talented son’s popularity.

Anyway, you can get a sense of what we’re in for in the months to come with the appearance of Joseph Jackson and Al Sharpton in the press conference they held yesterday. The elder Jackson was apparently stung by criticism that he’d talked about his new record label at the BET Awards the previous night. So, on the occasion of his first oppotunity to address the world on the ocassion of his son’s death, he … talked some more about his record label:

Us Magazine is posting that the father of MJ’s two kids with Debbie Rowe is a SoCal dermatologist, Rowe’s former boss:

Though Michael Jackson was wed to Prince and Paris’ mother, Debbie Rowe, their biological father is Arnold Klein, Jackson’s L.A.-based dermatologist and Rowe’s former boss, multiple sources confirm to the new issue of Us Weekly.

“He is the dad,” says a Jackson insider. “He and Debbie signed an agreement saying they would never reveal the truth.”

———–

Previously in Hitsville

• John Branca to the rescue?
• Where there’s a will …
• The death of Michael Jackson: Topics for further discussion
• Elvis and Michael: The Lost Boys
• Ongoing thoughts on Michael Jackson
• Michael Jackson and the ultimate crossover
• Can Michael Jackson play live?
  
• Catching up with Michael Jackson’s finances
• A footnote to the Neverland auction
• Thriller (and “Billie Jean”) 25 years later

Isn’t the most pressing question about Michael Jackson who is in control of his business affairs? CNN was full of reports over the weekend of vans moving things out of Jackson’s rented LA house. Assuming that Jackson had business ownerships in the form of a trust, someone should autmatically be in charge, right?

Why haven’t we learned who it is yet?

His main business seems to be MJJ productions, which presumably would have someone running day-to-day operations, such as they were in Jackson’s wacko world.  The other major companies are Sony/ATV, the publishing outfit he owns some part of but, barring some previously unexhibited masochistic streak on the part of his partner Sony, he should have little daily operations involvement. Jackson’s own publishing company is called Mijac, which administers his own songs and those of select others he’d purchased, like Sly Stone.

If, as has been reported, the trusts are actually now in the hands of his mom, the Jehovah’s Witnesses may end up with it yet.

The Hollywood Reporter article discussing a 2002 will in the custody of attorney John Branca was vague about whether Branca was still Jackson’s legal representative; this story, however, from the National Law review, says Branca “has been Jackson’s general counsel and transactional attorney for years.”

The only trouble with that theory is … that Branca hasn’t been working for Jackson lately. The WSJ, today, however, says Branca … is back!

There were other signs that Mr. Jackson was starting to get his finances back in order. Just last week, he rehired John Branca, the high-profile Los Angeles entertainment attorney who struck many of the singer’s most lucrative business deals, including the ATV acquisition and the joint venture with Sony.

That is, if he can take time away from his baseball card collection ….

This is the first of what may be many Michael Jackson wills, courtesy of Roger Friedman, the guy who got 86′ed from Foxnews.com a while back for talking about file-sharing on the internets, and is now working for the Hollywood Reporter:

The issue of Michael Jackson’s will—containing disposition of assets and appointment of guardians for his children—can finally be addressed.

Sources say that Jackson’s final will was drawn up in 2002, after the delivery/birth/acquisition of baby Blanket aka Prince Michael II. The word is that Jackson’s longtime attorney and adviser John Branca, the man who kept Jackson out of many calamities in the 1980s and 90s, is the executor.

(The link is to HR sister pub Billboard.)

As Hitsville noted yesterday, Jackson’s former friends and associates will be poking their heads up in the weeks to come. This is the first sally from Branca, who was of course the source for Friedman’s story. I always found Friedman level-headed, but here, perhaps overheated in these perfervid postmorten days, he’s overwriting.

Friedman lets his feelings for Branca show in his blog:

Branca, as I’ve noted before, is Michael Jackson’s children’s best possible advocate at the moment, and the only assurance they have of not being ripped off in the long run.

As a consequence, it’s hard to take seriously his assertions. One, this isn’t “finally going to address” the status of Jackson’s will. It’s going to begin to address it.

And how does he know—how could Branca know—that it was Jackson’s “final” will?

Most particularly, if, as is often said, Jackson’s child molestation trial in 2005 was a watershed for him financially and emotionally, it’s not hard to imagine he’d taken steps to revisit it in the ensuing seven years.

I’d be more convinced if Friedman had said, “The will, written in 2002 and updated by Jackson as circumstances had changed over the ensuing seven years …. ” Since Branca is undoubtedly his source, the fact that he didn’t say that is a pretty strong indication Jackson hadn’t been updating it—and that there’s no reason to think there’s not a later, supplanting document.

———–

Previously in Hitsville

• The death of Michael Jackson: Topics for further discussion
• Elvis and Michael: The Lost Boys
• Ongoing thoughts on Michael Jackson
• Michael Jackson and the ultimate crossover
• Can Michael Jackson play live?
  
• Catching up with Michael Jackson’s finances
• A footnote to the Neverland auction
• Thriller (and “Billie Jean”) 25 years later

Ashleigh Banfield turned up on CNN the other day to discuss Michael Jackson. The appearance of Banfield—a highly watchable journalistic cocktail of Roland Hedley and Suzanne Stone Maretto who appeared on MSNBC full-blown, accoutermented with air filters and surgical masks, in the dusty hours after 9/11, rose meteorically to cover Afghanistan for the news channel in a fetching burka, and then disappeared into the black hole of her own ridiculousness soon after—gave confirmation, if it was needed, that the circus was in town.

With any luck, it’s gonna be here for a while. A few of the acts:

1) Who killed Michael Jackson? Drug reports will come drizzling out as the media and the LAPD searches for a certain Doctor Feelgood, selected by Jackson as a live-in medico but paid for by AEG, the concert promoter, who makes a cameo in the 911 call during Jackson’s death but then dropped out of sight. Now, Jackson obviously killed himself with his drug use, paranoia and mental decline. But it must be said that, the evening before, he’d been rehearsing on the stage of the Staples Center, so he wasn’t an invalid. The doctor is now re-appearing, having now, one assumes, lawyered up. Youth wants to know: How do you die when you have a live-in doctor?

2) The hangers-on and spokespeople. Jesse Jackson is with the Jackson family, drumming up suspicions about the doctor. (Thus far I haven’t seen an intrepid newsperson ask Jesse why, if he was so gosh darn close to Jackson, he didn’t do something to stop him from drugging himself to death—or whether he ever had any suspicions about those sleepovers with young boys. It’s a question the rest of Jackson’s family should be asked as well.) The doctor will have his own spokespersons, as will, in order, AEG, the concert promoter; Colony Capital, Fortress Investment, and Barclays, the companies that had apparently bought up big chunks of Jackson’s debts; and Sony. Jackson went through dozens of managers, advisers and accountants over his 25 years of decline; these guys will be making appearances as well. The holy grail, however, will be …

3) The whispers of David Geffen. Geffen was a longtime unofficial adviser to Jackson, and undoubtedly the source behind some of the anonymous information that has come out about him over the years. His name won’t appear in any of the upcoming stories, of course, but he should be getting back into the mix soon. Look for gnomic statements about Jackson’s financial behavior in authoritative-sounding major pieces in tony outlets like the NYT, LAT or WSJ, or loucher but industry-specific ones, like Nikke Finke’s blog. And don’t think Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown aren’t calling him.

4) The kids. Jackson has three, two by his onetime wife Deborah Rowe, and another, colloquially referred to as “Blanket,” with an as-yet-unidentified surrogate.

It takes a lot to surprise me when it comes to such stories. Hitsville always assumes the worst! But I nearly did a spit-take when I heard legal analyst Diane Dimond, who is not an idiot, speak about the kids with Keith Olbermann last night. Maybe it’s been reported; but this was news to me and I bet it is to you, too:

Let me tell you: It has long been known by those of us who cover Michael Jackson that Michael Jackson is not biologically connected to those children. There was a sperm donor that made those children with Debbie Rowe. Many of us know who that sperm donor is. Michael Jackson handpicked that sperm donor. If he now suddenly comes forward and says, ‘I want my kids, take my DNA; those kids are mine, I want them.’ Then what happens? He’s gonna fight with Debbie, it’s just a mess. And then a surrogate can come forward for Blanket ….

5) The estate. Gerald Posner, who is also a smart guy, told Chris Mathews that Jackson’s affairs had been put into various trusts during the time of his child-sex trial. The implication seemed to be that he needed to protect his assets, though I’m not sure why. In a worse-case scenario, he’d get convicted of the molestation and plying-a-kid-with-alcohol charges, and then face civil action, but it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t be able to afford simply to pay off any judgment. He wasn’t going to get a $100 million assessment against him, right? And even if a hurricane of charges made that possible, he, unlike OJ, had so much high-profile income accruing from blue-chip entities like Sony it’s hard to imagine his being able to keep collecting that money in the face of legal liabilities of that sort.

Anyway, the Journal and the NYT will go nuts in the coming weeks trying to untangle the state of Jackson’s finances and the hierarchies of the various claims against his estate. (Today, for example, the Times reported tentatively that Jackson’s mother, Kathleen, controlls his part of Sony/ATV through a trust.) Despite major stories on this in both papers it’s all still rather opaque.

One major question that I haven’t seen even asked in the coverage thus far, though it is by far the most salient, is what precisely is the status of Jackson’s partnership with Sony in the publishing company Sony/ATV. (The pair merged their publishing operations.) The Times reported some years ago that Sony had advanced him $300 million against what was said to be half of what was said to be Jackson’s half-ownership of the company.

Assuming that went though (if you read the story carefully you can see that it does not precisely say it did) and further assuming both that a) the above facts are true and b) Sony is a smart operation, Sony may come out of this with a secure 75 percent of the company and be sitting relatively pretty—assuming, finally, that the $300 million was not an inflated valuation for 25 percent of the company. (I take the point that the Beatles catalog is valuable, but it was valuable when Jackson bought it for $47 million; why is the ATV half of Sony/ATV worth $600 million today? Is it generating a modest five percent return, i.e., $30 million a year in income?)

On the other hand, the company’s ability to take control of that extra 25 percent portion may hinge on Jackson’ defaulting on the loan in some way that may or may not technically happen. The story is today’s Times makes some assertions that don’t quite jibe with its previous reporting. More on that in a second.

Specifically, there is the status of the debts held by two mysterious groups—Fortress Investment Group and Colony Capital—and then Barclays Bank. Fortress had an extraordinary hold on Jackson, carrying so much of his debt that it was collecting some $4.5 million a month just in interest from Jackson for at least a couple of years, according to the Times. Fortress has dropped out of sight of late as Colony stepped to the fore, but according to the Journal Colony held just a $24 million note on Jackson, which is how it acquired Jackson’s sleepover castle, Neverland Ranch.

In Jacko’s world, $24 million is chump change.

Colony was also said to be behind the pressure for him to get his ass back on stage and earn some money. As for Fortress, the Times says flatly today that Barclays now holds the big sum of $300 million against his share of Sony/ATV now, which is I assume the former Fortress debt. Next to the status of Sony/ATV, the big question about Michael Jackson right now is this debt; last year the WSJ said it was $400 million, so obviously neither paper is working with precise sources. And no one’s talking about what Sony got for its original bailout of Jackson, back in 2006.

Anyway, this big note has magicked itself up in the TV coverage to “Michael Jackson is $500 million in debt.” That’s sounds different from merely having a debt of that much, and is probably not correct; however much Jackson owes, it needs to be balanced against the value of his holdings, in ATV/Sony and his own personal operation. The Times says that could be worth as much as $100 million.

It’s possible, again, that the Sony bailout never went through and that the $400 million figure is a cumulative one, and not a new accumulation of debt, which might mean that his publishing holdings alone might cover his obligations. In other words, the estate might lose the publishing all together, but it would still have the rights to his recorded catalog (publishing, remember, is just songwriting royalties) and what I assume would be its share of his own personal publishing, a not insignificant asset.

On a final hand, remember that things had recently come to a serious pass with Jackson; he’d been backed into a corner and basically forced to get back on the road to get some money coming in. With his death it’s possible that some of the nuclear options that had obvious threats to his financial well-being could come to pass.

6) Collateral damage. The doctor, who went AWOL, is apparently someone who feels his interests are being served by doing what he can not to be involved in the investigation into Jackson’s death. It seems likely that he’s going to be a loser in this story. Sony may do okay it if gets its hands on at least part of Jackson share of the publishing, but still might end up with an unwelcome partner holding at least 25 percent of it. Hard to see how Colony comes out a winner, but it depends on how the loans are protected.

In the category of really fucked are the scores of people with lawsuits already pending against Jackson. Get in line, suckers! AEG, the company that thought it had finally met the getting-Michael-Jackson-back-on-stage challenge, seems on the hook for at least $30 million in outlays for the London shows, if news reports can be believed. (Plus it gets to refund some $80M-plus in sold tickets.) The company is putting on a brave face and saying insurance will cover its losses. Hard to countenance Lloyds of London would have risked $80 million on the chances of Michael Jackson showing up to do record signing, much less scores of concert, something he hadn’t managed to do for more than a decade. Even if AEG tries to do some cheesy Jackson family tribute concert in place of Jackson, could then string it out over 50 nights?

Jackson’s reputation will go into the toilet as all the stories people were afraid to tell when he was alive come to the fore. (A lot of them are going to be told by veterans of Jackson’s sleepovers.)

But no one’s more fucked than Jackson’s kids. They might as well start taking painkillers right now. Best case scenario is that they end up with Kathleen Katherine and Joe Jackson, Michael’s parents. Look how their children turned out.

7) The winners.  Sony, ironically, will get one last post-iTunes cash infusion as nostalgic fans buy Jackson CDs; it will be interesting to see how much they eventually total, however. But remember that Jackson had a worldwide popularity, so Sony will be making bank disproportionately in less digital-savvy lands. (It’s also easier than it is in the U.S. to fudge sales records and royalty statement overseas.) As for Fortress, if it really was making upwards of $50 million a year on a $200 million note for a couple of years before getting bought out by Barclays it probably did fine. And if Sony arranged the Barclays refinancing Barclays should be fine as well, because Sony will just pay it for another chunk of the publishing catalog.

Those with stories to tell about Jackson will extract a lot of dough from tabloids not averse to paying for their information. The legal commentators will be riding high for the foreseeable future as a vast carnival of court proceedings spread out before them, involving hundreds of millions of dollars, drug use, incompetent advisors, shadowy behind-the-scenes figures, cartoonish figures elbowing for the spotlight, and the fates of three innocent kids.

And finally, the biggest winners of all will be Jackson’s family, hardened by years of financial game-playing with their doomed son; now free to run wild (there’s already reports of objects being moved out of Jackson’s house), they will be free to collect unimpeded the eggs from the Golden Goose who, alive, had been so difficult.

As the Michael Jackson hoopla-cum-mourning continues, you’ll hear lots of comparisons of Jackson to Elvis Presley.

Jackson was a popular figure, and as I wrote yesterday he did represent an apogee of crossover, with commercial results we can wonder at to this day. Presley, of course, was uniquely popular too.

Both suffered from their stardom; both coasted for decades on early concussions of creativity; both lost themselves in an abyss of cowed courtiers and drug use; both, let’s face it, were sexual predators, a term I use not as a general-purpose epithet but as a descriptive term about people who systematically pursue under-aged kids for sexual purposes and, in both cases, were uniquely positioned to be successful at it, leaving some not insignificant legacy of damaged lives in their wake; both died, sadly, wasted away in a laceratingly pointless fashion, knowing, in their hearts, that they could not longer do the things that gave them their power in the first place.

Both were man-boys with infantile sexualities and preadolescent images of themselves as gang leaders and missionaries. Both changed from impossibly beautiful youths into ravaged adults, Presley bloated and dazed; Jackson self-mutilated almost beyond recognition.

But there the similarities end.

Presley grew up severely disadvantaged; I don’t want to make comparisons to a black family in Gary in the 1960s, but let’s remember that his father was basically a failed sharecropper. Out of this environment, one that should have made him a racist cracker, he developed a visionary perspective on music that hadn’t been imagined before. Blacks and whites, country and gospel, blues and pop. And he did it at a time when no one wanted it—indeed, almost everyone didn’t want it.

Presley invented a music and created its audience. Fine—so did T.K. Records, right?

But this wasn’t disco, for two reasons. What Presley invented with his voice was something that, in a sociological sense, was the internet of its time—by which I mean that it carried in it the seeds of its own revolution, and grew in power in the face of opposition. It did it by being so right—with the clarity of its conception and the audacity of its idea: Bringing those musics, and cultures, together. I think we can agree the rock era’s effect on society was definitive.

And that audacity was the second reason. Rock is the most American of musical genres because its conception is just that big. If I may quote Greil Marcus, Elvis Presley “almost has the scope to take America in.” America, like rock, is often flawed in its execution but it’s hard to argue with its ambition or its intents. The implications of America—the idea of America, not the reality of it—is monumental, something you can’t get your mind around. Presley—his audacity, his vision—is too big to think about as well. His tragedy is so vast it calls into question the future of the society that created, and destroyed, him.

Now, as for Jackson. As I wrote yesterday, he is the embodiment of crossover—the biggest star of his time, the culmination of some three decades of gracious black pop. Motown commandeered that music and cleaned it up for presentation to whites; Jackson took the lessons he gleaned from Berry Gordy, imagined a world that he bestrode, and didn’t stop until he did.

But: Since that world was merely a commercial one, Michael Jackson’s life doesn’t resonate like Presley’s. Sure his Thriller was the biggest record ever, for a while—but its commercial appeal soon burned out and, as the years went by, it was steadily overtaken and then supplanted by … Springsteen? Prince? Madonna?

No, just a dorky Eagles greatest hits album (”Oooh-oooh, witch-chay woo-man!”), beloved of the modern-day frat boy. Ten years or so after Thriller, Michael Jackson’s artistic footprint had washed away. He was no longer a star per se but rather a spectacle. Elvis Presley died at home, but no artist was farther away from himself at the time of his death; Jackson, by contrast, remained at the center of his own created world until the very end.

His legacy incorporated himself and nothing else, though I suppose you could throw Usher and Justin Timberlake in there. We’re still living in the world Elvis Presley created; for all intents and purposes, Jackson’s ended yesterday.
—————-

Previously in Hitsville:

Michael Jackson and the Ultimate Crossover
Can Michael Jackson play live?
Catching up with Michael Jackson’s finances
A footnote to the Neverland auction
Thriller (and “Billie Jean”) 25 years later

Also, here’s a discussion I had on Presley with the amazing Ann Powers in Slate …:

The Book Club: Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley

… and a long essay on Jackson I wrote for the Chicago Reader in the mid-1990s:

The Education of Michael Jackson

(updated as the day goes on)

4) Quincy Jones interviewed: Did he worry about the child sex allegations against Jackson? “Yes, but I could never put my finger on it.”

3) From the “It-couldn’t-happen-to-a-nicer-group-of-people desk”; a Reuters story about the exposure of AEG, the promoter of Jackson’s 50 scheduled London shows:

Paying back the face value of some of the estimated 750,000 tickets sold is unlikely to be AEG Live’s only headache.

The company is reported to have invested $20-30 million on the production already, not including any advance to Jackson.

And the O2 Arena, which appears on AEG’s list of sites it owns or operates, is now faced with 50 empty nights, some of which it will struggle to fill at such short notice.

2) The media is reporting all sorts of things that make no sense. The NYT wrote last night, and I just heard someone on MSNBC report, that Jackson sold 750 million albums.  Are they crazy?

Let’s give him his 100 million for Thriller, which I don’t believe for a minute.

The Jackson Five were a singles band; Jackson recorded six albums as an adult. Do people think he sold 150 million copies of each on average? Does anyone know how to do math? Even if you take singles into account and accept uncheckable sales figures from around the world it’s hard to see how he sold more than 250 million records, or a third of that total.

Then the MSNBC reporter said, without sourcing the info, that he may have been “a half billion dollars in debt.” That seems a little extreme! (Update: But see this attempt to do the math.)  And then in the next breath she quoted his attorney saying that Jackson was “still generating great cash flow.” But of course, that was his problem: he wasn’t generating cash flow. Duh! That’s how you go into debt. He hadn’t released any new albums, and he hadn’t made any concert appearance. Where was the money coming from?

1) Get ready for the mother of all legal battles. Jackson undoubtedly left a legal and financial mess behind. It’s obvious that he was deeply in debt, by the simple expedient of having no income and spending money like a sheik; that his death will set off a feeding frenzy as his many creditors fight like jackals for the remains; and that the dozens of lawsuits he had going will grow enormously.

You can already see the more buffoonish members of his family posturing for the cameras, notably Jermaine:

My brother, the legendary King of Pop Michael Jackson, passed away… Our family requests that the media can respect our privacy during this tough time. And may Allah be with you, Michael, always.

… is sick and in a nursing home and in need of financial help, according to this story in the SF Chronicle, passed along by Gina Arnold.

Williams was hospitalized after his bike accident for a month. The doctors declared it a “miraculous recovery” and he was able to continue Crawdaddy and other writing. But symptoms of dementia began to appear and Williams’ everyday life, including writing, became a struggle. In 2008, he was put into managed care by his wife, Cindy Lee Berryhill.

As I know Gina knows as well, Williams was an exceedingly kind person whose original writings on rock ‘n’ roll, in the magazine he founded, Crawdaddy, set a standard for intellectualized discussion of the music.

I always remembered something he said to me a long time ago, which I later used in a short piece I did on him. It wasn’t about music; it had to do with a writing, or more precisely, a writer’s character:

“I try not to cop an attitude,” Williams says, and shrugs. “I did when I was young, but I was arrogant and stupid.”

You can get info on how to donate here.

The photo above I took from his website; it was taken by Michael Stipe. One thing has to be said; Williams had an amazing life. A few choice events are detailed in my interview with him:

Present at the Creation: Paul Williams, the father of Crawdaddy

Who the first rock critic was is a matter for debate; legend has it that the San Francisco Chronicle’s jazz writer, Ralph Gleason, was the first daily journalist to take the music on its own terms, just as the Dead and the Airplane were coming to prominence. In New York City, Richard Goldstein was writing serious commentary on the music for the Voice and the New York Times around then as well. And at about the same time, a 16-year-old Boston kid named Paul Williams was writing down his thoughts on the music explosion. He xeroxed them, stapled the result together, and called the thing Crawdaddy!
The next few years were heady: For decades, Brian Wilson’s lost Smile album was a Holy Grail for critics; Williams sang backup on it. As Timothy Leary’s campaign manager for his rather fanciful run at the California governorship, Williams participated in John and Yoko’s bed-ins and made an appearance in the accompanying “Give Peace a Chance” video. The rock world was much smaller then: He remembers being at Warner Brothers and talking to superproducer Richard Perry. Perry said he’d been recording a new group with one standout, if diminutive, member. His name, the producer said, was Paul Williams: “But don’t worry, we’ll change it.” The writer said not to bother.
He was sent to Woodstock by Playboy, crashed in Jerry Garcia’s hotel room, and made his way to the concert site with the Johnny Appleseed of LSD, Oswald Stanley. Beforehand he’d even been asked to contribute to the festival’s program, now a rare bit of rock paraphernalia indeed. Williams, stopping in Chicago recently for a show by Cindy Lee Berryhill, with whom he now lives near San Diego, says he hadn’t seen the thing in decades until a friend recently gave him a copy. What was his piece about? Williams pauses, his mind coursing back to a much earlier time. “Celebration,” he says finally.
He tired of Crawdaddy! after a few years and walked away from it at the cynical old age of 20. He collected his music writing in one book, Outlaw Blues, and worked on others. One of these was a volume of reflection commissioned by Elektra Records. Williams wrote it on an island commune in western Canada. The resulting Das Energi is still available after 25 printings, having sold about 350,000 copies. “In the 70s it was part of the whole self-help thing,” he says. “In the 80s it moved over to the new-age section. I never had anything to do with it.” Williams settled in Sonoma County in northern California and stayed with his various interests: among other projects, he tracked with a scholarly eye the progress of Dylan’s career and oversaw the literary estate of Berkeley science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. In the mid-80s, however, his ears pricked up. The investigation that followed produced an interesting book called The Map, in which he looked into bands like Husker Du and the Violent Femmes and found something happening again. This reawakening has informed most of his work since, most notably the typically wide-eyed and open-minded Rock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles.
Last year, after a hiatus of nearly a quarter century, he started publishing Crawdaddy! again. It’s different now, but the same: a xerox-and-staples quarterly affair mostly filled with one extravagantly long Williams essay on a group of current albums. The new issue covers the Counting Crows, Tim Hardin, Joe Henry, Liz Phair, Uncle Tupelo, Pavement, and Berryhill. Those brought up on the fanzine morass of Spin or the unintelligibility of the Voice will find the patina of what an unsympathetic person would call 60s overoptimism. But what comes through is intelligence, honesty, and sincerity; absent is anything flip or glib. “I try not to cop an attitude,” Williams says, and shrugs. “I did when I was young, but I was arrogant and stupid.”
Writing like this still has its adherents: Williams sells about 1,000 copies of each issue. It comes out four times a year; you can get one for $4, four for $16, or eight for $20 by sending a check to Crawdaddy!, PO Box 23115, Encinitas, California 92023.
“What’s of concern to me is what happens when we listen, why we put this stuff on a pedestal,” he says. Such concerns transcend time, place, or style. “If anything, I can say that I was around in the 60s: I saw Janis play, I saw Jim Morrison play, in their heyday. Yet I absolutely totally disagree with anyone who thinks that some past time is better than what’s going on today. I always find myself saying, ‘Hey, it’s happening right now.’”

CNN’s coverage of Michael Jackson’s sudden illness in the minutes before his death was reported captured nicely the way the media has treated him. Nutty people were allowed to talk at length, including a guy who kept saying his concerts in London were in 2010. (They were scheduled for next month.)

Wolf Blitzer looked into the camera to tell us earnestly that the head of the concert promotion company had told them that Jackson was in “tip top shape,” and that he’d passed a health exam “with flying colors.”

Funny how an impossibly pampered 50-year-old guy in top-top shape could just keel over dead.

We’re supposed to live in an Age of Paparazzi. Isn’t it curious how stars nonetheless manage to die right before our eyes?

They do it with our complicity.

——-

Born not just to celebrity but to stardom, Michael Jackson never knew what it was like to live normally, or even behave normally. He was drafted into the family’s musical act, the Jackson 5, while in elementary school, and taken to Motown records. He was taught how to live a manufactured image at the feet of Berry Gordy, who was quite good at such legerdemain.

If you’re nine years old and born to be a star, such training will definitely turbocharge the marketing of your record sales; as for the fact that almost all the money from those sales went to your teacher and not you … well, that was his second lesson.

Trust, truth … there were concepts Michael Jackson learned early on didn’t have much worth. But of course he had his family, right?

His angry father beat him and his eight siblings with some determination, reputable biographers have told us. (Untrustworthy La Toya said that she and Michael were sexually molested, too.) On tour at age ten, Michael tried to sleep as his older brothers banged groupies in the motel rooms they shared. Then all the kids watched in wonder as their father took up with another woman and had a child with her.

Love, marriage, sex … Michael Jackson learned early that those didn’t mean much either. The Jackson 5 had a three-year run, not bad for a kid act. When the family, which realized it hadn’t made any money, left the label, a vengeful Gordy exacted as a price not just a brother—Jermaine, who, married to Gordy’s daughter, stayed at Motown—but even their name. When they moved to Columbia, they couldn’t use the name the Jackson 5.

Michael was all of 14.

In five years he collected himself, extracted himself from his father’s control and recorded two albums that would change the music industry. The best was the first: 1979’s Off the Wall, a groovy, irresistible stunner. Blithe and implacable, sparkling and protean, it displayed a lean and kaleidoscopic talent, feline in his sexuality and relaxed in his blackness. The round-faced, broad-nosed charmer looking out from the album’s cover reeked not just of charm but confidence and, for the last time, normality.

Three years later, Thriller would take what became an epochal step forward in terms of commerciality. Viewed now, with the befit of hindsight, we can see Jackson’s evolving physiognomy symptomatic of an insecurity we didn’t think to question at the time.

His celebrity’s toll on his own and his family’s life became considerable. For some unaccountable reason, after Thriller he still lived at home, as his family busied itself with intrigues and cockamamie plans. One imagines him sitting in his room ignoring the knocks at his door as offers of millions came in to the family from across the country and around the world to do just about anything—anything, that is, that Michael would do too.

With the exception of Janet, his youngest sister, who somehow managed to extract herself and create her own extraordinary career, virtually every member of his family managed to blemish their reputations; among other things, more than one of the boys, their father’s sons, were charged with beating up their girlfriends or wives.

The story from that point is a bleak and unrelieved one. Superficial things: Michael’s ludicrous trappings and entourages; the fetishization of the armed militias marching around in his videos; tales of his supposed bizarre doings leaked to tabloids; the grasping grandiosity of his public appearances. Jackson had a flair for exploiting the tabloid celebrity he had, but that was a skill he shared with Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton, and it probably shouldn’t be listed among his unique abilities.

More serious things: Mismanaged tours; declining songwriting skills; ever-more erratic album releases.

Even more serious things: An entirely transfigured physical appearance, morphing from an engaging and handsome African-American man into a misshapen Eurasian woman; his skin bleached, his faced resculpted; his nose, finally, needing to be practically taped on to his face. He left his race behind and, in a sense, his family too. (The nose, which seemed to have borne the brunt of his obsession with plastic surgery, was his father’s.)

The master of crossover had seemingly crossed over for good.

And finally, a black moral hole, and a descent into a double life as a sexual predator. You’ve heard about not taking candy from a stranger; Jackson’s candy took the form of literal amusement parks. There were nights of fun and sleepovers and inappropriate touching and …

Accusations were leveled many times; most cases were settled; one case, gone to trial, ended in an acquittal in Santa Maria in 2005.

In the obituaries, writers will savor Jackson’s talents, which were unquestioned; his ambition, which was otherworldly and a thing of awe; and his heyday, which was lasted really just a few years, and encompassed perhaps two and a half albums. Others will reflect on the tragedies visited upon him and those he visited on others.

I think it’s fair to classify Kurt Cobain’s death as one brought on by medical problems, specifically the roiling interaction of depression and addiction. Jackson’s death is in this sense more purely a suicide, just as Elvis Presley’s was some three decades ago. Like Presley, Jackson at some point stepped through a door, closed it, and turned the key. What went on behind the door we’ll never know.

Here’s what I wrote about Jackson and his plans for a comeback tour last year:

Jackson’s history with tours is checkered, of course, but this seems an obvious way to stave off financial problems. (And he could make even more if he kept his ambitions reined in and did a disciplined greatest-hits show with a minimum of spectacle.) The troubling question about Jackson is this: Is a tour or a series of performances the trump card, deep down inside, he knows he can put on the table when the need arises? Or is his mental or physical condition such at this point that it’s out of the question? If it’s the latter, Michael Jackson’s last years may turn out to be truly unpretty.

—————-

Previously in Hitsville:

Can Michael Jackson play live?
Catching up with Michael Jackson’s finances
A footnote to the Neverland auction
Thriller (and “Billie Jean”) 25 years later

The idea that she got $14 million for it, as reported by the Wrap here, or $15M, as reported by the Financial Times here, is slightly farcical. The buyer is Mail.com.

Entrepreneurship is hard, I understand, and Finke deserves whatever money she gets. But there are ethical issues involved when journalists spin their own stories, and it’s hard to believe the $14 million figure and other varying ones being bruited about aren’t coming from Finke. How can we believe her reporting when she allows misrepresentations to emanate from her own camp?

Sharon Waxman, who runs the Wrap, is a serious journalist, and I suppose we should take her at her word that some “individual knowledgeable about the purchase price” uttered the $14 million figure to her. But she should have quoted someone else saying the figure was a joke.

Over at something called Daily Finance, an intepid reporter there vouchsafes that the figure was $10 million, quoting a “source with knowledge of the details.” But the writer, Jeff Bercovici, has the decency to follow the factoid up with “observers who know the new-media deal market consider the $10 million figure improbably high.”

Meanwhile, over at PaidContent.org, Rafat Ali reports:

… I have heard from sources that the sale amount was in “seven figures” and there are some other incentive triggers built in. My bet is it is in very low seven figures, with some cash and possibly some equity built in.

… and notes that the $10M and $14M figures are “fantastical.”

FWIW, Hitsville bets that it was less than $1 million—and that, at whatever amount, Mail.com is investing in a risky figure. As detailed here and elsewhere, Finke’s undeniable talents and enviably accelerated metabolism are undermined by journalistic behaviors deplorable at best and self-destructive at worst.

Katie Couric was off last week, so on one level it’s not fair to blame her for the fact that the CBS flagship newscast lost ten percent of its viewership last week, knocking it down below 4.9 million viewers, or half a million fewer than its all-time historical low.

On the other hand, Couric had already brought it down to that historic low the last two weeks.

Hitsville’s beef, remember, isn’t with Couric, though, as a skanky infotainment specialist she is about as qualified to sit in the anchor’s chair as Julie Chen, or Jeff Probst, for that matter.

It is with her tongue-bathing courtiers in the media news racket, who have been working overtime to tell us every little bit of positive Couric news but asleep at the switch when it comes to doing open-eyed reporting on either a) her astonishing ratings plunge or b) the discussions inevitably underway in Les Moonves’s office about what to do next.

Hitsville’s candidate, incidentally, is Probst, who can’t do any worse ratings-wise and will cost the company about $14 million less annually than Couric.

Ideally, CBS News would use that money to hire 100 full-time reporters, though it’s hard to see Mr. Julie Chen devoting money to improving the quality of the product; he could have done that instead of hiring Couric in the first place.

Couric, as I have suggested before, can do a nightly infotainment show, up against Leno; even with her insane salary it should be able to do OK in the 10 p.m. slot.

I wish Howard Kurtz and his fellows were inquiring inside CBS what the networks long-term idea for the Evening News is.

NBC now has an audience more than half again as big as CBS’s, and more than that in the demo; its command of network news is buttressed by two powerful growing forces.

The economics of MSNBC helps keep a large news staff and stars like Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd gainfully employed and busy; CBS, by contrast, has to maintain an international news organization for a tiny half-hour nightly broadcast, “60 Minutes” and not much else. Short of buying CNN, there’s no way it can compete.

And now NBC is plainly the new administration’s go-to network; not for nothing did Obama pepper his Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner speech with references to Chuck Todd, Mika Brzezinski, and Williams. It’s particularly ironic that the celeb-friendly Couric was outflanked in this way at the dawn of the most glamorous White House in nearly fifty years.

Now, NBC has some own problems, too, particularly MSNBC: Keith Olbermann has turned, seemingly permanently, into a pompous blowhard; Rachel Maddow does not have the gravitas to be a serous force; and as for Ed … I don’t really understand Ed.

Still, for NBC News, both of those forces will have the momentum of critical mass behind them

In other words, CBS News has no ratings; a tarnished, out-of-place star; and no bench. Its management has no ideas, and when faced with problems turns not to change but PR assaults. That has done nothing but mask deepening wounds inside.

What can it do now but jettison its news division?

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

Couric’s ratings: It gets worse
Confidential to Tom Shales and Howard Kurtz: Katie Couric’s ratings are in the tank again!
Couric Watch: Ratings plummet!
Paging Katie Couric!
Dear Tom Shales
Katie Couric—Where America Turns When the News Is Over™
Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™
Couric and CBS, lying
Should CBS jettison its news division?
Katie Couric’s ratings hit a new low
Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later 

Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s manager, posted a missive yesterday responding to a contention that Springsteen’s organization had held back 95 percent of the good seats at a concert in New Jersey. The allegation was in this story in the NJ Star-Ledger.

You can read the story and Landau’s response and judge for yourself whether there’s a contradiction or not. After acknowledging that Springsteen, like every artist, holds back tickets for friends and family of an enormous touring operation, Landau seems to deny the story’s main contention:

The 2,000 to 3,500 tickets closest to the stage are on the floor and more than 95% of them go to the public, making the basic premise of the Star Ledger headline [”Springsteen withheld best tickets from the public at NJ concert, records show”] inaccurate. Secondly, with regard to seats held in the best sections on either side, we always blend guest seats with fan seats so that there are never any sections consisting entirely of guest seats.

I think there are some interesting things about the Star-Ledger story.

1) In my experience, Landau’s explanation rings true; comp tickets aren’t often or largely directly in front of the stage. There’s of course always a triple-A guest list, but the idea that some 90 percent of the best seats at a show at a Bruce Springsteen concert were turned over to VIPs doesn’t seem likely. In arenas, comp seats tend to be in the side areas closest to the stage; the Star-Ledger story seems to fudge this distinction.

2) The idea that 90 percent of the best seats at a show of a shittier, greedier artist might go to VIPs or to artist-scalped fans is, however, entirely plausible.

3) Note that the Star-Ledger didn’t do the story about a shittier, greedier artist. The one who gets targeted is the only top-tier figure who has dared to speak out against Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

4) Left unsaid is this very real distinction: It’s the artist’s show. Barring holding the tickets back for secret scalping, artists are welcome to keep all the seats back they want. It’s their show, and the money is coming out of their pocket. The issue is when parasitical organizations like Ticketmaster or Live Nation are doing the under-the-table shenanigans.

The story gets junkier from there, including this part:

And, ticket brokers say, [the Springsteen ticket holds] helped drive up prices on the secondary market. Although tickets sold for $95 and $65 in the initial sale, some tickets were selling for hundreds of dollars more on the secondary market.

“Simple economics 101 would tell you that any time you restrict supply the price will be much greater,” said Robb Kenison, a ticket broker from the Washington, D.C., area. “I would not be surprised if a seat in 109, 110, 120 or 121 was double if not triple what it would have been had they sold even 50 percent of the seats in the sections.”

Quoting a scalper complaining about high ticket prices is like quoting a car thief about high car-insurance prices.

Back in the 1990s, when Pearl Jam got drawn into its battle with Ticketmaster, the band, too, became the focus of similar criticism and second-guessing—much of it, as here, from news outlets that never bothered to write about the much-more-outrageous behavior of Ticketmaster before.

The Journal’s crushing scoop on Steve Jobs the other day—which said Jobs had had a liver transplant in Tennessee a couple of months ago—left competitors flat.

Generally when news like that breaks, the reporters who got scooped are sent off on one of the most humiliating jobs in journalism—calling sources and asking, rather pathetically, if they could possibly confirm the story for you so that you can report it to your own readers as straight news, crediting the competitor who got the scoop originally as far own in your own story as possible.

(Howard Kurtz has this down to a fine art.)

Anyway, the odd thing about the WSJ story is that it cited no sources in its flat lede, and backed up the lede’s assertions nowhere else in the story:

Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple Inc. since January to treat an undisclosed medical condition, received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago. The chief executive has been recovering well and is expected to return to work on schedule later this month, though he may work part-time initially.

A hint to who did leak can be found in this key graph, similarly delivered with no sourcing:

At least some Apple directors were aware of the CEO’s surgery. As part of an agreement with Mr. Jobs in place before he went on leave, some board members have been briefed weekly on the CEO’s condition by his physician.

I don’t buy a lot of the complaints about anonymous sources, myself; much of the problem is just a subset of the game-playing papers get into with governmental officials, trading anonymity for incremental disclosures on an ongoing political agenda that have no real value for readers.

In other words, a big part of the vacuous use of anonymous sources are part of stories that are shitty in the first place. But it is fun to watch the papers enforce rules about it, producing some nice semantic juggling as they try to both still use the anonymous sources and simultaneously explain why the sources are unnamed

I suspect that this was a one-source story. The usual formulation would be to make the attribution as vague as possible: “… sources familiar with the matter said.” (The use of the plural in that phrase is one of the biggest lies in journalism.)

So it could be that the Journal decided rather than broadcast how flimsy their sourcing was they’d just go with a pronouncement from on high. More charitably, you can read it as a little bravura flourish. It intimidated the NYT so much, for example, that the paper’s follow-up could not only do nothing but report the fact that the Journal had reported the operation, but also didn’t even bother to state something that would cry out to be mentioned (and would, for example, be exhibit A if the story were later found to be inaccurate): That the WSJ, with an unusual disregard for big-time journalism’s first law, cited no sources for its information.

Say you’re a big-time media critic, like Howard Kurtz. It’s time to do a little media analysis on that newfangled Twitter. Your angle:

[T]he site is less important than the way its users are changing the media culture. They are exchanging more than just 140-character bursts of blather about their daily lives: They are guiding their friends and followers to the latest news, information, gossip, snark and a pulsating, real-time debate.

If only you had an up-to-the-minute example of how that phenomenon you’ve identified manifests itself!

Kurtz, who works for the Washington Post, started to work the phones. He got one:

When I mentioned on my Twitter page that I would be talking on the air about Conan O’Brien taking over “The Tonight Show,” I got a flood of messages.

Well, ok, that didn’t require any phone work, or even looking past one’s belly button. Still, every reporter knows that one anecdote does not make a story. Kurtz went deeper, all the way down to … the celebrity angle:

[T]he boldfaced names may provide carefully calibrated glimpses, but some actively engage with their fan base.

I became friendly with Mariel Hemingway when the actress began following me on Twitter. When I began checking out her page, I was struck by how often she shared the details of her life, from her hiking to her bedtime. Without any handlers or publicists, we agreed to meet for a CNN interview when I was in Los Angeles.

Turns out Hemingway was promoting a cookbook! How surprising she would agree to meet with … a journalist.

And how fortunate that she is about the most glamorous cookbook author one can think of. One suspects that if Kurtz had noticed Dick Van Patten was following him on Twitter that they might not have “become friendly,” which I bet is a euphemism for “I sent the attractive actress a private Twitter message.”

Anyway, the point of all this that, while Kurtz was flirting with Mariel Hemingway and marveling that normal people would tweet about someone in the news, there was a very real example of how Twitter users are interacting with the media.

Here’s a story in todays’ NYT, about how CNN unaccountably blew off strong coverage of the chaotic aftermath of Iran’s election:

Untold thousands used the label “CNNfail” on Twitter to vent their frustrations. Steve LaBate, an Atlanta resident, said on Twitter, “Why aren’t you covering this with everything you’ve got?” About the same time, CNN was showing a repeat of Larry King’s interview of the stars of the “American Chopper” show. For a time, new criticisms were being added on Twitter at least once a second.

In other words, while the Post’s media critic was writing a dizzily focused, celebrity-dripping recitation of the obvious, the Times was doing an actual story  with a real-world impact stemming from the same subject.

The difference? Kurtz, of course, works for CNN.

In his Washingtonpost.com chat this morning, with typical intellectual dishonesty he addresses a question on the issue from a visitor:

Howard Kurtz: The role of bloggers and tweeters in covering the unfolding Iran saga has been invaluable. And with Ahmadinejad’s regime starting to crack down on the likes of the BBC, it’s been a difficult story to cover.
I know Twitter folks have been all over CNN for not providing more coverage on Saturday. I’m sure CNN could have done more, rather than run some taped programming, perhaps by taking the CNN International feed in the U.S. But it seemed to me that CNN did more than the other cable networks, with regular reports by Christiane Amanpour from Tehran, and especially on Sunday, when it ran many hours of live coverage.

Note how he tries to position himself as being in the know .. and then spins for the network that employs him … without revealing the confllict of interest.

A lot of people don’t like Kurtz; what bugs me about him, and to my mind makes him unfit to hold the positions he holds, is that intellectual dishonesty.

To me, an honest media critic would a) first have bent over backward to include the issues in his piece, and b) in any case bent over backward to address the issue later. (”I wish I’d been alert enough to have noticed the Twitter complaints about CNN while I was doing my in-retrospect-pretty-superficial Twitter piece in this morning’s paper. I don’t agree with most of what was said about CNN—which, remember, writes me a paycheck every week—but it was a trenchant example of the thesis of my piece.”)

And later in the chat Kurtz spins for CNN again:

But when there’s an extraordinary event, such as what is happening in Iran, they need to step it up. As I said, CNN had a lot of coverage on Sunday but not as much as people were demanding, which is why they turn to blogs and Twitter, where some folks are always posting, around the clock.

Link via kausfiles. By the way, Hitsville is on Twitter, too.

Just caught up with the All Things Digital interview with Irving Azoff. Kara Swisher is not an unformidable person, but the eight minutes of excerpts we get do not indicate that she was informed or knowledgeable enough about the issues involved to take advantage of a prime opportunity to question a guy who is poised to be the most powerful single person in the history of the music business.

Instead, using a decrepit journalist trope, she merely quotes the opposition, Bruce Springsteen:

AZOFF: We think that everything we do evolves first around what’s good for the artist and good for the fan; that’s our new business plan.

SWISHER: The criticism from Bruce Springsteen, who is not a small act, is that, I don’t want to go through this. I don’t want to be sucked though this..

AZOFF: [flash of irritation] I would basically just say that Bruce Springsteen is uninformed about what the potential of this could be for him.

SWISHER: The idea that you have all these levels, that have to come through you, could be frightening to people …

AZOFF: Everything that’s gone on in the music business has always been frightening … They were frightened of Napster, frightened of iTunes. This is just normal evolution of where the business is going. It’s a myth that there’s not competition out there.

Azoff artully deflects her question into an answer about the industry being frightened, rather than fans and artists. Then he makes a statement that any head of a potential massive combine might make … and Swisher didn’t follow up.

Here’s what else she didn’t ask:

One: Isn’t there a conflict of interest between being a manager and booking a concert tour? What’s good for Live Nation might not be good for a particular artist. It’s like having a real estate agent selling you houses he already owns. Two: Auction pricing. The easiest way for Live Nation to get around scalping is to scalp the tickets themselves, by auctioning them off to the highest bidder. The company’s term for this is “dynamic pricing.” It’s coming.

Three: Both of these companies are in precarious financial shape; shouldn’t a Wall Street Journal reporter ask whether both shouldn’t be allowed to let their respective stockholders take it out on their misguided managements? Specifically, Live Nation used to be called Clear Chanel; that company bought up the U.S. concert industry, and now can’t make it work. (Case study here.)

Brehmer has been the morning guy on WXRT in Chicago for about fifteen years, part of a team of DJs who are arguably the smartest and most music conscious of any at any commercial outlet in the country.

This was his latest Facebook post:

Lin Brehmer If you have received an email from my place of business concerning a political action and it is allegedly from me, rest assured I did not write the email; I never read the email; and i certainly never endorsed the email before it was sent to over 100,000 listeners. It’s just something they do. Send out emails and sign my name to them without my knowledge. I will always be on the side of the musicians.

He doesn’t say what the email was about, but, based on his last line, one can guess that it was apparently an email broadcast, sent under his name, from CBS Radio, ‘XRT’s corporate owners, about the moves by the music industry to try to exact a performance tax out of radio.

Currently, radio kicks into a fund to pay songwriters when a song is played; when the industry got going, it was exempted from a performance tax, one that would go to the artists (and, not unimportantly, to their labels), on the sensible grounds that radio airplay represented free publicity.

Now the industry, which has been undergoing a delightful-to-watch financial waterboarding for the last decade, is scrabbling to get Congress to give it a performance tax.

Radio, as you can imagine, isn’t happy about it. Here’s a sample of CBS Radio’s argument:

Congress is considering a law that could force some of your favorite radio stations to limit the amount of music they play, or even drive some stations to stop playing music altogether by enacting a performance tax on free broadcast radio.

The NAB’s dedicated site to the issue is here.

Leaving aside CBS’s skanky use of Brehmer’s name, it’s a hard issue to come to a decision on. Commercial radio, which has treated listeners with contempt and the public airwaves as corporate ATM machines for decades, is in such horrific financial straits right now that (pace my friends at ‘XRT) one is reflexively in favor of anything that would help put the nail in its coffin.

On the other hand, it would seem that at least half of the performance fees would go to the labels, arguably the one entity in the U.S. entertainment industry more corrupt than commercial radio itself.

And MP3s and the internet have made radio irrelevant to serious music fans, so it’s no longer the menace it was when it controlled fans’ access to music.

An ideal solution would be for Congress to enact a performance royalty for radio that goes exclusively to the artist.

Since we’re fantasizing, it would be nice if Congress also enacted a law placing formal fiduciary responsibility on the labels in terms of their handling of artist royalties, which would create a strict legal mechanism to correct the current state of affairs, which allows labels not to pay royalties essentially with legal impunity.

From TicketNews.com:

Miley Cyrus will sell VIP ticket packages to her show on the site ILoveAllAccess.com, which is offering “[e]xclusive access for Miley Cyrus fan club members only, with special password, until June 9 17:00 BST,” according to their Web site. ILoveAllAccess.com is owned and operated by Ticketmaster’s Front Line Management, which is Cyrus’s management company.

VIP tickets, which will cost $295 each, are not yet available for sale. Instead, they state that tickets are “coming soon.” Myley Cyrus tickets officially go on sale on Monday at Ticketmaster. ILoveAccess.com states that the ticket package includes a seat in the first 25 rows, access to the pre-show party, a gift bag, a souvenir, and parking.

It’s a glimpse into the future. Front Line Management is Irving Azoff’s management company. Ticketmaster is the the company he now runs. And Live Nation will be putting on as many of the shows that Azoff can manage.

TicketNews quotes a Ticketmaster competitor:

Don Vaccaro, president and CEO of TicketNetwork, told TicketNews that “this appears to be nothing more than a bait and switch by Miley Cyrus.” Vaccaro added that “her camp doesn’t disclose to her teenage fans that she is withholding her best tickets to scalp them at almost $300 each, leaving her true fans without access to some of the best tickets.”