Die-hard Michael Jackson fans are rejoicing after the late singer’s estate pulled three of his songs from streaming services and online stores last week.
Though you’d expect them to be against any kind of tinkering with the King of Pop’s catalog, they claim these specific songs are dupes that were actually recorded by a cover singer, according to a lawsuit currently pending in California Supreme Court.
The songs—“Keep Your Head Up,” “Monster” feat. 50 Cent, and “Breaking News”—were part of Jackson’s posthumous 2010 album Michael.
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The album was a mild commercial success for Jackson’s wildly lucrative estate, which earned $48 million in 2020 alone, according to Forbes. The tunes sound convincing to the untrained ear and delve into fairly personal matters. In “Breaking News,” the singer rails against the media’s obsession with his every move: “Everybody watching the news on Michael Jackson / They wanna see that I fall cause I’m Michael Jackson.”
But not everyone was buying what Sony and his estate were selling.
At the time of their release, multiple family members spoke out against the dubious recordings, dubbed the “Cascio tracks,” because they were recorded in the New Jersey home studio of friend Eddie Cascio.
“I listened to it. It doesn’t sound like him,” Jackson’s sister La Toya told TMZ back in 2010. That same year, their mother Katherine reportedly told Oprah that “some of the tracks on the album are fake.”
Jackson’s estate maintains that they’re real, even after taking the extraordinary step of scrubbing the songs from Spotify, Apple Music, and online stores like Amazon Music.
“The Estate of Michael Jackson and Sony Music decided to remove the tracks ‘Breaking News,’ ‘Monster’ and ‘Keep Your Head Up,’ from the 2010 album Michael as the simplest and best way to move beyond the conversation associated with these tracks once and for all,” a spokesman told The Daily Beast by email. “The album’s remaining tracks remain available. Nothing should be read into this action concerning the authenticity of the tracks – it is just time to move beyond the distraction surrounding them.”
That “distraction” might have something to do with the ongoing legal skirmish between fans, Jackson’s estate, and one of the world’s biggest music labels that could have long-lasting implications for the way music is sold and marketed.
A group of concerned “Moonwalkers” led by attorney Vera Serova sued Cascio, Sony Music Entertainment and the estate for deceptive advertising in 2014. They highlighted the album’s liner notes, which claim that the album contains “nine previously unreleased vocal tracks performed by Michael Jackson.” (The estate is run by co-executors John McClain and John Branca, though Jackson’s children and mother remain the beneficiaries.)
Both sides have experts attesting to the music’s authenticity—or lack thereof. Sony and the estate say their claims that Jackson sang the songs constitute protected free speech. Nevertheless, a California trial court held that the liner notes and a promotional video used to market the album were commercial speech subject to appropriate regulation.
Sony and the estate appealed the decision in 2018, citing California’s strong anti-SLAPP statutes aimed at preventing frivolous lawsuits that stifle free speech. This time, the appellate court sided with the copyright owners, ruling that the question of whether the records are real or not is now a matter of public interest and no longer a simple commercial pursuit, therefore protecting them from being sued.
Serova and her group appealed that decision to the state Supreme Court, still arguing that because the label and the estate made money off the songs, their claims are not a simple matter of free speech. (Serova declined to comment for this article.) Oral arguments took place this May, but a final order has yet to be handed down. The case traveled all the way up the state’s court system on technicalities. Depending on how the Supreme Court rules, it could be remanded back to the trial court, where a jury would decide if the recordings are authentic.
“Allowing giant corporations like Sony to use [the anti-SLAPP] statue to strike down consumer complaints would be an incredibly unjust result,’ said Bonnie Patten, executive director of Truth in Advertising, in an interview with The Daily Beast.
The nonprofit joined the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice in filing an amicus brief in support of the fans. Patten believes the estate’s quiet removal of the songs is a clear sign that their provenance is questionable at best.
“I find it hard to believe that the estate would pull these songs if Michael Jackson was the lead singer on this, because no doubt this could expose them to potentially more litigation,” she said.
It’s unclear how the songs were discovered. In the liner notes back in 2010, Sony said they had been “recently completed using music from the original vocal tracks and music created by the credited producers.”
50 Cent, through his publicist, declined to discuss how he ended up in one of them.
In the meantime, Jackson fans are celebrating the nominal victory.
Lead plaintiff Serova has kept in touch with a small group of fans in a Telegram group titled “Cascio Case Updates.” On June 29, she shared a tweet from Jackson superfan and documentarian Damien Shields.
“Looks like sony is REMOVING the 3 FAKE SONGS they’ve falsely attributed to Michael Jackson for the past 12 years!” Shields wrote. “INCREDIBLE.”
