Great Michael Jackson songs you might not have heard before

Here's a list of great Michael Jackson songs, which whilst they aren't as well known as his big hit songs like 'Man In The Mirror', 'Rock with You', 'Beat It', 'Billie Jean', 'Thriller' etc. are still all great songs. The following are amongst my favorite MJ songs and if you're a MJ fan you should like them all too!.

Part 1

I'm In Love Again (Minnie Riperton & Michael Jackson)

Call On Me

I Wanna Be Where You Are

Girl Don't Take Your Love from Me

In Our Small Way

Wings of My Love

Love Is Here and Now You're Gone (cover of The Supremes song)

We've Got a Good Thing Going

Everybody's Somebody's Fool

My Girl (cover of The Temptations song)

What Goes Around Comes Around

You Can Cry on My Shoulder

People Make the World Go 'Round (cover of The Stylistics song

Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day (cover of the Stevie Wonder song)

With a Child's Heart

All the Things You Are

Happy

Morning Glow

Music & Me

Girl You're So Together (original mix)

Lonely Teardrops (cover of the Jackie Wilson hit)

We're Almost There

One Day in Your Life

Farewell My Summer Love

Don't Let It Get You Down

You Really Got A Hold On Me (cover of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles song)

Touch The One You Love

Love Never Felt So Good (demo for Johnny Mathis)

More To Life Than This Freddie Mercury (of the group Queen) is playing piano. Freddie released a version song on his Mr Bad Guy album too. You can hear his version here

You Can't Win

Ease on Down The Road (with Diana Ross)

And that doesn't cover any of the Beetles songs he may have released, as he ruined a friendship from I read because he outbid a Beetle for the rights to most of their library.

That said I didn't know he had that many songs I've not heard, as I've listened to everything from Thriller forward and heard few from before Thriller and of course some from when he was with his brothers in the Jackson 5

I think the only Beatles song MJ has released was a cover of 'Come Together'. Your right he had a falling out with Sir Paul McCartney over the Northern Songs/ATV publishing catalog (which had the rights to mostly all the Beatles songs). Thing is, Paul and Yoko Ono could have bought the rights for the songs for $20m before MJ bought them, but didn't for some reason. IIRC MJ paid around $47m for the Northern Songs/ATV catalog and it must be worth a fortune now with what you can do in terms of licensing songs for commercials, movies etc. I think his estate owns 50% of it now though.

As songwriters, Lennon & McCartney still get songwriters royalties from all their songs anyway, so for example, if you use 'Yesterday' as an example, MJ's estate would get 25%, John Lennon's estate 25%, Sir Paul would get 25% and I think Sony/ATV (who own the other half of the Northern Songs catalog) would have the remaining 25%.

From what I've read there's even more unreleased MJ songs from when he was at Motown (with his brothers & as a solo artist) and songs he recorded whilst working on Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, Invincible etc. but some might just be song ideas/demos or alternative versions instead of complete songs which could be commercially released.

I might do a list of J5/Jacksons songs in a few days too.

This gets into more about it.

Code:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATV_Music_Publishing

From what I get, it seems basically Jackson owned the copyrights to whole library of some 4,000 Beatles songs. Though it also included life insurance, buildings etc. its also the reason Sony got into the record business I guess. Now the tricky part that doesn't seem overly clear is that one song earned at least $100k USD in royalties the Lennon estate would get 25% and Paul would get 25% and Jackson 50% but they don't totally make it clear as to the logic outside of the fact Lennon and Paul get the song writing royalties while Jackson got the copyright royalties but maybe you can make more sense of it

Sony got in the record business by buying CBS Records, which was one of the biggest record labels at the time. I also think it would have to do with the success of their walkman since if they went into the record industry they would be basically owning some of the music people are listening to on their Walkmans. MJ was signed to Epic too which was a subsidiary label of CBS and as he was probably the biggest artist in the world at the time that would have made Sony purchasing CBS a priority too.

I think Michael borrowed money from Sony and used half of his publishing rights as collateral to obtain the loan which is why his estate & Sony now co-own the Sony/ATV catalog. As for the division of song royalties, I'm not an expert, but to use the example John Lennon's estate would gain $25,000; Sir Paul would get $25,000 and MJ/Sony would get $50,000. The Beatles either gave up or sold their publishing rights to their songs, so in that instance they own half of the copyrights to their songs, despite them being the original writers of the songs. If they still owned the publishing they would have 50% of the songs. They would only own gain songwriting royalties from their own songs though and not any others from the songs in the Sony/ATV catalog. I think after a certain amount of time (I think it's 35 years but could be more) copyrights revert back to the original artist/songwriter. This might be dependent on whether the copyrights to the songs are renewed, otherwise in 35 years+ time the Sony/ATV catalog could lose alot of songs from it. There's an article briefly talking about it here

It seems from the article that the original owner Lew Grade bought up additional song catalogs in addition to the Beatles like those by Leiber & Stoller which is why Elvis is mentioned in the article. I'm not sure if they were originally part of the deal but reading the article it does mention a total of 4,000 songs and even back then $47m would have been a reasonable price to pay (if you're rich ofcourse!) for not only The Beatles but some of Elvis Presley's biggest hits songs too, plus the other thousands of songs too. When Sony/ATV merged the catalog would have included even more songs but I'm not sure if ownership of them was shared or if MJ just shared the rights to the original songs he purchased. I think he owned a smaller publishing catalog previously so that may be included in the Sony/ATV catalog too. Also you can search the catalog here

Thats where it gets kind of confusing as a song writer normally gets royalties. The copyrights have been renewed over the years of that I'm sure otherwise Disney would not own the rights to its most iconic character all these years later.

I'll read those links later

I have heard of none of those songs. Some good finds Moon.

Thanks, they are all my favorite MJ songs along with his more bigger hits like Heal The World, Man in the Mirror etc.

To use the Beatles again as an example, they (Lennon/McCartney and maybe George Harrison if it was one of his songs, not sure if Ringo Starr wrote any songs with the Beatles) would still get songwriters royalties whomever owns their publishing. That should be independent of how royalties are divided up. For example if me, you, Barry & Ryan all wrote a hit song together but you owned the publishing rights we would still each get 25% but you would have the right to do with the song what you chose in terms of licensing it for a movie, TV show, commercial etc. as essentially you would 'own' the song. Although I think the songwriter(s) have some say in how songs are licensed. For example if you owned the publishing to 'We Are The World' and used that in a commercial for say something like a product called World cola or World potato chips or anything like that, it's likely that Lionel Richie & MJ's estate would say, nope you are not using our song, because certain songs have like an importance to them and they don't want them to be associated with a product/service. However I know Moby licensed a lot of songs from his first album for commercials and that's how they became hits, so sometimes it works out that way.

As for copyrights in regards to music/songs there's more information here