A set of master tapes containing unreleased recordings made by Michael Jackson in the 1990s were last week dropped from an auction of pop memorabilia following a threat of legal action from the late pop star's estate.
US-based auction house Gotta Have Rock And Roll said that the tapes featured “incredibly rare unreleased recordings” made by Jackson during recording sessions at the Hit Factory studios in New York in 1994. It stressed that it was just the physical tapes that were up for sale, meaning the buyer wouldn't have any rights to make or distribute copies of the recordings.
However, it still expected each tape to sell for as much as $4000. And with more than two dozen tapes in the set, that would have been a decent return.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Jackson estate was not happy about the sale. It said that neither Jackson nor his record label Sony Music had ever sold or gifted any master tapes from the Hit Factory sessions, meaning the tapes up for sale must have been stolen.
According to Billboard, a legal rep for the estate sent a cease and desist letter to the auction house on 29 Nov demanding that the tapes be removed from sale and returned to his client.
Gotta Have Rock And Roll seemingly declined to comply with that demand, resulting in another lawyer, Alex Spiro, last week telling the auction house the estate would be securing a restraining order from the New York courts.
That seemingly worked, with the tapes being removed from the auction house's website the following day. Given that most of the other Jackson-related items being sold off in an auction that closed yesterday went for considerably less than Gotta Have Rock And Roll estimated, chances are the tapes wouldn't have generated quite as much cash as anticipated anyway.
