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.