Dead Pop Stars Are The Richest: Michael Jackson’s estate made $1 billion this year

Michael Jackson

There is an article in the Guardian, which puts things in perspective regarding how much our favorite pop stars are earning. I am not sure this is real news but the real winners in the money department are all dead. Forget about Beyonce and all the heavy weights of pop music, Michael Jackson’s estate made almost $1 billion this year – Jackson may have died $500 million in debt, but this is definitively not a problem now – the Elvis Presley estate made $55 million in 2015, the Bob Marley estate made $21 million, which demonstrates it doesn’t even matter if the rock star in question has been dead for a long time.

There is no numbers for David Bowie’s estate and Prince’s estate yet, they died too recently, but it is certain that the music sales have soared since their deaths, and if Bowie left $100 million to his family and Prince $150 million when they died, it’s obvious these amounts are about to double? Triple? Very soon we will know. The day after he died, David Bowie’s album ‘Blackstar’ went to the top position on iTunes’ sales chart, ‘Best of Bowie’ was in the number two spot, and ‘The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars’ was at number four’, whereas several of his albums were at diverse positions. As for Prince, he was dominating the digital charts on Amazon.com, on Apple and iTunes stores just after his death in April and it was reported that his record sales jumped by more than 40,000 percent after his death. It never fails, it is always happening and it is universal, dead pop-rock stars are massive business. As an indication, Kurt Cobain’s estate is now estimated at $450 million 22 years later, which means it has quadrupled since the death of the rock star since it was estimated that Cobain had a net worth of $100 million by the time of his death.

It has become a cliché, pop-rock stars worth more dead than alive, and in all these cases, this is always accentuated and propagated by an endless exploitation of the unreleased tracks or demos, an umpteenth reissues, compilations, and special box sets for each anniversary.

Beyonce earned $216 million in 2016, which is already an enormous amount of money, but nothing in comparison of dead Michael Jackson…. Pop stars worth more dead than alive, which is always an interesting perspective for us all, conspiracy theorists.