Selling Lies

In the early 1980's, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney worked on some music together, during this time MJ asked Sir Paul for advice on what he should invest his money in. Paul jumped all over that question telling Michael "Publishing rights" was the way to go. So, MJ took this advice to head and crossed the line...when the rights to all the 'beatles' catalogue was being auctioned off in 1985, Sir Paul contacted Yoko Ono and told her they should pool their funds to buy back complete control of the catalogue. Unfortunately, MJ had the audacity to outbid them for $47.5million (side note: McCartney was pissed and has not spoken a word to MJ since). and as many of you may be aware, Michael Jackson outright bought the Beatles catalogue, meaning he has complete control and owns their copyright (100%) and half royalties to over 200 of their songs .... meaning every single time a 'Beatles' tune is used, half the royalty money goes to the beatles, and the other half is deposited into MJ's pocket. Now a decade later this changed and he gave up half his rights and royalties to his label, Sony.
This is where the story gets good...in the late 1990's, MJ decided to go on a spending spree, so he approached the Bank of America about borrowing $270million, a lot of money, yes, but Michael put them at rest in saying, that he would easily repay them in his future record sales or else he would give them the 'beatles' catalogue as collateral. MJ being MJ (the man who wrote 'Thriller') he figured no problem. Only trouble is he didn't account for the fact his music would actually turn to shit and that he would become a weirdo outcasted by the general public. So, his deadline came and went and at present he has lost half his royalties in the beatles catalogue and is at risk of losing the rest. MJ blames the low record sales on the label purposely sabotaging him to fail by not marketing his product, in an effort to eventually acquire the beatles catalogue. Sony claims, Michael's music sucks shit.

Speaking of selling records... have you ever wondered how its possible for some major label artists to have their new albums go platinum (in canada this means selling 100,000 copies, in the States 1,000,000 units) on the day the CD is released? Well, this happens because its not determined by the number of CDs actually sold, but rather the number shipped. Now, that is quite commonly known, but whats a label secret is how they get the stores to take that many copies. What will happen is the label will work out a deal with say HMV saying "if you just store X amount of CDs in your inventory (you don't even have to shelve them)", we won't make you pay for them for six months and at that point, whatever doesn't sell you can send back to us for a full refund". Now of course HMV isn't gonna argue with that, and why would a label such as Sony do something like this,...well 'to feed their ego' and ...so their artist can go to their CD release party and receive their platinum record award for that album (which is kind of funny "CD release party") and than it can be put on the news the next day, and all the hype and free publicity will go towards having the general public go out and grab the album to see what all this praise is about. Whats stupid about it all, is 6 months down the line, the album could still have possibly not actually sold as many copies in total, as the industry conceded them as selling on the first day.

anyway, my brother forwarded me this website...www.metacritic.com. It takes reviews from all media sources across the world (predominately N.A.) and gives an average score to a CD, Book, Movie whatever based upon compiling all the reviews together. I find it acceptable, because they throw in no personal bias, and also show all the reviews and ratings individually below. you'll notice those fuckers at 'pitchfork', give near the lowest rankings for everything (to give off that fabricated image of the most established critics)