Twenty years ago, Michael Jackson was a pop star of galactic proportions, famous rather than notorious, and Robert Holmes a Court was a West Australian entrepreneur. Jackson’s album Thriller had earned him $100 million. Holmes a Court’s Bell Group was the model of the acquisitive 1980s. Among Bell’s assets was ATV Publishing, which owned the publishing rights to more than 4000 songs, including 251 Beatles tunes.

Jackson had been introduced to the mysteries and possibilities of publishing rights by his then friend, the ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, in the early ’80s, and had dived into the market.

Today, with a $US270 million ($350 million) loan outstanding and six-figure legal fees to be paid, ATV Publishing, since merged with Sony, is the cornerstone upon which Jackson’s crumbling empire rests.

The ATV sale negotiations stretched over nine months in London and New York. One of the sticking points, according to The Age in 1985, was that Holmes a Court wanted to keep some of the titles in the catalogue as gifts for relatives and friends. Eventually, the sale was finalised for $US46.5 million.

The entity known as Sony-ATV Publishing owns the publishing rights to more than 300,000 songs. It was formed when Sony paid Jackson a reported $US150 million to merge his catalogue with its library.

Estimates of its total worth have risen sharply over the course of Jackson’s trial on child molestation charges, from $US400 million to $US1 billion, The Wall Street Journal says, to as much as $US4 billion to $US5 billion, an assertion made last month by Jackson’s lawyer, Thomas Mesereau.

Booming markets in online digital music sales and mobile phone ring tones appear to be the main reason for such a substantial reassessment.

The existence of a growing asset of this stature, which can be used as security against further loans, suggests Jackson is unlikely to go broke in the foreseeable future, despite debts that, like every other aspect of his existence, are also larger than life.

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