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Plenty of Jackson music in vault, awaiting release

By Jake Coyle Associated Press

NEW YORK — Michael Jackson had a mountain of unreleased recordings in the vault when he died — music that is almost certain to be packaged and repackaged for his fans in the years to come.

The material includes unused tracks from studio sessions of some of Jackson's best albums, as well as more recently recorded songs made with Senegalese R&B singer and producer Akon and Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am.

"There are dozens and dozens of songs that did not end up on his albums," said Tommy Mottola, who from 1998 to 2003 was chairman and CEO of Sony Music, which owns the distribution rights to Jackson's music. "People will be hearing a lot of that unreleased material for the first time ever. There's just some genius and brilliance in there."

The releases, Mottola said, "could go on for years and years — even more than Elvis."

Since Jackson's death Thursday, there has been an enormous, almost unprecedented demand for the King of Pop's music. Nielsen SoundScan said Wednesday that three of his records — Number Ones, Essential Michael Jackson and Thriller — were the best-selling albums of the week, and 2.3 million tracks of his have been downloaded in the United States alone.

When a music star of Jackson's stature dies, labels typically comb through their archives to pull out anything they can release.

Mottola, who has described himself as the "shepherd and gatekeeper" of Jackson's catalog and is more familiar with it than anyone, said that for every album Jackson made — including classics such as 1979's Off the Wall and 1982's Thriller — he recorded several tracks that didn't make it onto the records.