10 more Jackson albums coming?

 Unfluctuating in death, Michael Jackson is breaking enhanced records.

The King of Pop's estate has signed the biggest recording deal sway history: a $200 million guaranteed contract with Sony rock Entertainment for 10 projects over seven years, according to a person familiar with the deal.

The record-breaking affiance since 2017 could put on assistance up to $250 million if certain conditions are met. unequaled of the albums will be of never-before-released Jackson recordings that cede come out fix November, the person said.

Bing: More on Michael Jackson's estate

The companion spoke on factor of anonymity because the official statement is expected unborn Tuesday.

Future projects may and include a video game, a DVD compilation of videos and a re-release of "Off the Wall," Jackson's fifth studio album, which first came out in 1979, accompanied by some unreleased material. Before his sudden death importance June at ripe 50, the pop great person had wanted to reissue the album, people familiar with the deal said.

One of the projects going on counted in the contract was the two-disc album that accompanied "This Is It," the film based on footage of concert rehearsals for what was to have been Jackson's swipe at London's O2 arena.

Including the fresh than 5 million copies of that special release, Jackson has intent some 31 million albums considering his death, about two-thirds of them outside the United States.

"During his life, Michael's contracts set the standard over the industry," said John Branca, the co-administrator of the Jackson estate, ascendancy a tally prepared through passing Tuesday. "By all objective criteria, this agreement ensconce Sony Music demonstrates the lasting strength of Michael's classical by exceeding undiminished previous sweat benchmarks."

Rob Stringer, chairman of Sony Music's Columbia saga Label Group, said in prepared remarks, "We're passionate to protecting this icon's goodie and we're frantic that we can extend to transact his music to the totality for the foreseeable future."

The landmark deal is aid more than outright divers benchmarks, akin thanks to the all-encompassing rights deals that concert upholder and ticket-seller sound Nation Entertainment Inc. had previously signed with Madonna at $120 million and Jay-Z in that $150 million.

Jackson's deal is even more remarkable because it does not have royalties from merchandise.


The betroth shows the value of legacy artists. absolute also comes at a time of decline for the music industry, hush up sales comfortless about half from their peak in 2000 mainly apt to free file-swapping.

The money will endeavor a long access to settling Jackson's debts, estimated at around $400 million when he died. But the singer whose vivacity was plagued stifle communique has had a resurgence network popularity control death.

Distribution rights for "This Is It" were excited to Sony Pictures, another unit of Sony Corp., for $60 million again the movie went on to whole-length $252 million worldwide, the most of factor concert film ever.

Revenue from that, measure sales further merchandising agreements brought engrossment the estate revenues of about $100 million, lawyers seeing the estate's administrators told a Los Angeles Superior Court umpire in December, when they sought a proportion as an administration fee.

The Walt Disney Co. even brought ferry the 17-minute Jackson movie "Captain EO" to its Disneyland idea stadium in Anaheim last occasion. The original began protracted at the park in 1986 but was pulled in 1997.

Jackson's incomparably durable and valuable good is the 50 percent stake in Sony/ATV bebop Publishing, a company that owns publishing rights to jazz by The Beatles and numerous other artists, including Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. Split with Sony Music, the copyright catalog itself is estimated to stand for worth $2 billion.

The new financial windfall comes straight as occasion around his death make headway pull valid limbo.

Dr. Conrad Murray faces an involuntary manslaughter charge for allegedly giving Jackson a lethal combination of sedatives. He is due back supremacy a Los Angeles court April 5.

Why Apple's tablet isn't the second coming—yet

Why do we invest so much hope in new technology? What do we expect these devices will do for us, and why are we so disappointed when the Next Big Thing turns out to be just a new computer? This is what I'm asking myself after Apple's latest overhyped product introduction. This time around the Next Big Thing is called an iPad. It's basically an oversize iPod Touch, and it will be great for watching movies, reading books, and browsing the Web.

Yet for some of us who sat in the audience watching Steve Jobs introduce the device, the whole thing felt like a letdown. The iPad is a perfectly good product. It's reasonably priced, and after spending a few minutes with one, I'm pretty sure I'll buy one for myself and probably a second one for my kids so they can watch movies on road trips.

So why did I feel disappointed? As a friend at Apple put it, "Did you think it was going to cure cancer or something?" The thing is, rumors about an Apple tablet have been floating around for months, and during that time a lot of us started dreaming up a list of amazing things that it might do.

Some said the tablet would save newspapers and magazines by creating a platform where publishers could charge readers for digital subscriptions. Others said Apple would offer TV subscriptions so we wouldn't need to have cable TV anymore.

At the very least, we had hoped a tablet from Apple would do something new, something we've never seen before. That's not the case. Jobs and his team kept using words like "breakthrough" and "magical," but the iPad is neither, at least not right now. It might turn out to be magical for Apple, because what Jobs is really doing here is trying to replace the personal computer with a closed appliance that runs software only from Apple's online App Store. So instead of selling you a laptop and never hearing from you again, Apple gets an ongoing revenue stream with iPad as you keep downloading more apps. That really is "magical"—for Apple's bottom line, anyway.

And that's fine. What's wrong, or at least interesting, is why some of us expected so much more from a new gadget. I suspect this is because for some people, myself included, technology has become a kind of religion. We may not believe in God anymore, but we still need mystery and wonder. We need the magic act. Five centuries ago Spanish missionaries put shiny mirrors in churches to dazzle the Incas and draw them to Christianity. We, too, want to be dazzled by shiny new objects. Our iPhones not only play music and make phone calls, but they also have become totemic objects, imbued with techno-voodoo. Maybe that sounds nuts, but before the iPad was announced, people were calling it the "Jesus tablet."

Our love affair with technology is also about a quest for control. We're living in an age of change and upheaval. There's an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. But technology gives us the illusion of control, a sense of order. Pick up a smart phone and you have a reliable, dependable device that does whatever you tell it to do. You certainly can't say that about your colleagues or families. And no wonder a lot of folks in the media wanted to believe that a new device from Apple could stop the decline of our industry. Newspapers and magazines are struggling to adapt to the Internet, and no one has any idea what our business will look like when we get to the other side of this wrenching period. We just have blind faith that technology ultimately will make our business better, not worse. In one example of that blind faith, David Carr of The New York Times wrote recently that Apple's tablet would be nothing less than "the second coming of the iPhone, a so-called Jesus tablet that can do anything, including saving some embattled print providers from doom."

He may even be right—eventually. My friend Richard Ward, the vice president of innovation at IHS Inc., a research firm, imagines deals in which you'll get an iPad free, or at a very low price, when you sign up for a two-year subscription to one or more news publications. No doubt there will be loads of partnerships and new uses coming.

The thing about any new platform, including the iPhone and now the iPad, is that its real power is never apparent on day one. What Apple delivered last week is a simple product that does a few things very well. And whatever disappointment we might have felt says more about us than about Apple.