MICHAEL JACKSON

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson

Background of Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana in 1958 to an African-America n family, one of eight children. He endured a traumatic relationship with his father Joseph Jackson who acknowledged to beating his son Michael regularly with a whip to attain better performances in rehearsals. He also allegedly made fun of Michael's physical appearance commenting on his features such as his nose - these details apparently affecting his later life.

These issues aside - Jackson's unparalleled success in the music world began at the age of just 6, him joining his older brothers to lead several performances around Mid-West America, winning a major competition on the way. In 1968 they signed up with Motown Records where his popularity and public respect for his talents were clearly apparent. In 1978 - now signed to Epic Records (subsidiary of CBS) Michael released 'Off The Wall' with legend Quincy Jones as his producer. The album was commercially and critically very successful. His success went even further with the release of 'Thriller' in 1982, becoming the best selling album of all time worldwide. This was the peak of his career, although 'Bad' his next eagerly anticipated album was still a high earner. His music production whilst still evident was never so ground-breaking again, his merchandise, video sales, music sales not nearly as sought-after as Thriller, his personal life and professional life (often intertwined) suffering at the hands of the tabloids and sceptics, and being called on trial on a few occasions. It was only at his announcement of his comeback and final tour 'This is It' did his fortunes reverse, ironically further intensified at the time of his death in 2009, aged 50. His music is predominantly mainstream pop and in this essay I will focus on the release of singles 'Thriller',

Background of Digital Music

The birth of digital music arrived in 1999 with an American company named Napster, the internet and the mp3 - its successes heavily due to its policy of allowing unauthorised mp3 file sharing. To counteract this problem the industry created Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, preventing any musical file with lossy compression (i.e. mp3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, ATRAC and lossy Windows Media Audio (WMA) from being duplicated. In 2003 Apple's iTunes Music Store burst into the scene, almost straight from the outset-dominating the music market, with an 80% share of this in the US, the somewhat 'clunky' outdated feature of other transitional platforms such as mp3.com falling to the wayside. This was later opened in the UK in2004, the UK already familiar with Apple's iPod - a huge success almost everywhere, therefore naturally these two forms of media coupled with Apple's unparalleled corporative strategies would inevitably appeal widely to the consumer market. After advances in legislation and public demand to freely copy or share their purchase to different forms of media (i.e. iPod, other hardware devices such as phones, laptops, laptops, CD's etc) copy protection was dropped from the majority of ...