Thank God he died, now he'll start making some money

Michael Jackson's estate signs deal for $250 mil in a 10 album deal. He was believed to have had financial troubles before he died.

Only one of these albums will be unreleased material. So what's going to be on the other 9 albums? Maybe one or two could be remixes and box sets, but then what?

Focus- Discuss actors, singers, others who are worth more post-humously.

 

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.forbes.com/2006/10/23/tech-media_06deadcelebs_cx_pk_top-earning-dead-celebrities_land.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.forbes.com/2006/10/23/tech-m ... _land.html</a>

The list is as follows:

Kurt Cobain
Elvis Presley
Charles M. Schulz
John Lennon
Albert Einstein
Andy Warhol
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
Ray Charles
Marilyn Monroe
Johnny Cash
J.R.R. Tolkien
George Harrison
Bob Marley

Another good alternative thread discussion would be who do you think will make the most after they past away e.g.

George Lucas
J.K. Rowling
etc,

 

Focus: Jesus

Alt. Focus: I would pay a lot more to see nickelback if they were dead. That way they couldn't sing to me.

 

Wanna know just how clever George Lucas, check the fine print anytime you see a Droid commercial. The word droid is a copyright held by Lucasfilm Ltd.

Focus: The list is fail without the late, great Tupac Shakur.

 

Elvis is everything I owe to my staggering admiration of music: everything I love about music, my favourite artist of all time, the coolest artist of all time, the original innovator of everything, the best-selling artist of all time. He has sold over a BILLION RECORDS worldwide.

Before anybody did anything, Elvis did EVERYTHING.

A BILLION records, kids....do you know who is in second place? Nobody.


Also, Bob Marley and Johnny Cash round out my Triple Crown of Timeless Legends. In my book, there's three people you don't fuck with in the music industry ever: The King, The Man In Black, and The Soul Rebel. Their music will always be wonderful, and therefore people will always buy it.

My issue with this was proved when Cash died and M.J. as well: all of the sudden these uber fakes coming out of the woodwork with sob stories on how these atrists"meant so much to them". Nope. You're a lying piece of shit. You never even heard the song "Cry Cry Cry" or "Get Rhythm" before Johnny died. Just because you went to see Walk The Line, bought one of those black & White concert shirts with his guitar on it and you liked his ho-hum cover of "Rusty Cage" your lcoal rock radio station plays doesn't make you an instant fan for life. You never were.

 

Lucasfilm is huge -chances are the last movie you saw had special effects work by Industrial Light and Magic and sound production by Skywalker Sound. It's definitely going to keep making money after he dies, but I don't know if ole Georgy is the best example of someone with a modest or diminishing fortune when they are alive and a huge estate after they die. He's already worth 3 billion.

Musicians frequently fit the bill for this. A lot of them die young and had horribly managed fortunes while they were alive. People like Jimi Hendrix and Elvis spent a shitload of money, and while they made vast amounts their managers took more than half. After they die, the family sues for control and rake in the cash from rock solid album sales for decades, along with new releases of "lost tapes" that come up every few years.

Oh, Elvis was the prototypical sexy rock/pop star that girls love and parents yell about in church- that's true, but he did jack shit as far as revolutionizing music goes. He sang black people songs and looked great on stage and was a phenomenon of that time and place (the beginning of the rock era). He was certainly talented, but are you going to tell me that "Viva Las Vegas" and "In the Ghetto" were more revolutionary than "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Like a Rolling Stone"? That's horeshit.

 

...kind of like of every hip-hop star does with songs written by white people. I'm not just talking about the music. Granted, it was awesome, but it was the image and lifestyle I admired even more. He "roared with the Billies". Bought the cars, the house, the clothes, the swagger, banging all the hot famous girls, the drugs, the booze, WHATEVER. Responsibility DID take a backseat to him, but everything awesome about being a rockstar he ushered it in. Everyone from Johnny Cash to to Lou Reed to Motley Crue followed that lead by example and it shows, and you can't deny how cool artists like that truly are.

Cash I'm not Super-Duper music fan of, just greatly respect as an artist and a person. Ask just about ANYBODY famous form the old days and you'll never here a bad word about the guy. He was a listener, he wanted to know what other people thought instead of himself. On his music show, he didn't WANT the guest artists to play their biggest hits, but the songs they wanted their fans to hear. Very classy, in my eyes.

...and don't you ever, EVER put me within ten light years of the word "emo" again.
HOW DARE YOU, SIR.

 

How about 90 percent of literary figures.

One of the greatest examples of this being Kafka. He is probably the writer I would most like to read in his native language, that being German. Him and the Russians...

 

Charles Manson, because no matter how much money he may be making now he can't enjoy it.

 

Is he actually making money?

Focus: I would bet that Stevie Ray Vaughan would fit into this category. He blew a ton of his money on drugs and booze before he got clean in the end. Now all of his stuff has been remastered and re-released, Fender has an SRV guitar, etc. I don't know that his estate is bringing in that much money, but it's probably more than he made alive.

 

What about Heath Ledger? As soon as the guy starts doing some real movies, he goes and dies on us.

 

Nah. While he's hailed (and rightfully so) as one of the best guitar players that ever lived, he didn't have a whole hell of a lot of material like Lennon did. And Fender had the signature Strat out while he was alive. They are making money on the replicas of his actual axes now, though.

But anyway, SRV isn't very popular with the younger crowd. He doesn't really have the appeal to them like the The Beatles do, unless it's a guitar playing 17 year old. That said, The Beatles estate will continue to rake in the money for decades after Sir Paul and Ringo shuffle off. That family lineage is all set for the next 100 years or so.

 

Frank Zappa. He wasn't exactly struggling for money while alive, in fact he did very well for himself and managed to retain all rights to his music, something a very small amount of artists with his kind of exposure manage to do. Not to mention the amount of material he churned out while alive.

Since his passing, hundreds more compilations, live recordings, previously unrecorded music, remastered cds... its insane how much Zappa material there is. A branch of HMV in central London used to have almost an entire aisle in the store taken up Zappa records. There are frequent, "Zappa plays Zappa" tours head up Frank's son Dweezil and a small amount of Zappa tribute bands that yes, have to pay a cut to Frank's widow. (She's quite litigious when it comes to playing Frank's material, even as a tribute act.

While Frank's appeal isn't as widespread as that of Elvis or Hendrix, which is a shame (I've noticed you either, "get him" or you don't, which is bizarre considering the variety of material he released) I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Zappa estate rocket over the last two decades in comparison to how it may have fared while Frank was alive.

 

Stieg Larsson (author of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series of books, now to be put into film) is another example of a literary figure dying before they really hit it bigtime with money flying in from every angle.

Can you imagine how much money Picasso, Monet or any of the great artists would be making now if they were alive and their masterpieces appreciated? Granted art is an industry that thrives on rarity value and the idea of buying from a dead artist makes their paintings so much rarer, but any one of them would be sitting on a veritable fuckton of money

 

He died a miserable drug addict and fugitive from justice, but he's sure been raking it in ever since.