The Beat: Remembering Jackson’s music

The will. The kids. The parasitic father. The funeral plans. The London concerts refunds. The Beatles catalog. The unreleased vault of songs.

It's exhausting thinking about the fallout from Michael Jackson's death and more draining to realize we're going to hear about these things for a very long time.

Jackson's father, Joseph, whom one of my colleagues succinctly dubbed a "geriatric hustler," could be a column topic himself, especially after that grotesque display on the red carpet at Sunday's BET Awards in which he promoted his new record label and expressed such heart-tugging sentiments as, "Remember, we just lost the biggest star in the world."

But why waste time on a bully who can't even express grief for his deceased son?

While it's (sadly) true that Jackson is probably worth more dead than alive given his lavish spending habits and messy financial dealings, it's also true that his passing has anointed him a temporary savior to the music industry.

Yesterday, Nielsen SoundScan disclosed that the top eight positions on this week's Billboard Top Pop Catalog Albums chart are occupied by Jackson titles.

In the three days after his death June 25 (sales tracking ended Sunday night), Jackson's solo albums sold 421,000 copies. The week before, according to Billboard, his titles moved a combined 10,000 units.

Jackson's hits compilation, "Number Ones," tops the list, with 108,000 copies sold (a 999 percent incresase from the week before his death when the album sold 4,000 copies).

Since 241,000 of the 415,000 total were sold digitally, it would be interesting to know the demographic breakdown of sales.

Are Jackson fans in their 30s and 40s who might only have a dusty "Off the Wall" LP or cassette now finally getting around to buying it on CD? Or is the newer generation of Jackson fans -- the ones who don't understand why music should be presented on a physical disc (a hint it sounds better) -- racing to digital download sites to zip "Thriller" onto their MP3 players and computers?

We've all read the stories about how the news of Jackson's death spread like a virus through social networking sites, but think about how our need for instant gratification has forced us to change as consumers.

Last Thursday night, local record stores nationwide, as well as the "big box" retailers, such as Target and Best Buy, boasted about selling out of their Jackson inventory within hours. But realistically, how much inventory did they even have? A few copies of "Thriller"? Maybe one or two of "Dangerous" or "Bad"? It's not as if Jackson was currently a hot topic who would command major space in the "J" section.

It seems odd to contemplate, but considering Jackson's position as a global superstar of unrivaled proportions, his death might be the first time that the entire world of consumers used the Internet to buy music, whether through iTunes or Rhapsody where inventory can never run out -- or online retailers, such as Amazon.com, Buy.com or any of the thousands of sites that sell CDs.

Because record stores are being closed monthly, it's impossible that Jackson's product could have sold nearly half a million copies within days without Internet retailers, and those Nielsen figures only represent U.S. sales. Think of the number of people in Australia and Japan who awakened to the news and rushed online to buy a musical memento of Jackson.

With all of the migraine-inducing chatter about the layers of Jackson's eccentric life that will be peeled away and publicly dissected ad nauseam, it doesn't take too much brain power to see that to most people, Jackson's music is still what matters.

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If you have a favorite Michael Jackson memory to share, send it to me at the e-mail address below. I'll post some of the responses on the Pop! Culture blog (TimesDispatch.com; keyword: pop culture blog) in the coming days.

Contact Melissa Ruggieri at (804) 649-6120 or .