Updated: Joe Jackson's record company partners with bluestar technologies.
So, what the heck is this new Blu-ray company that Michael Jackson’s father Joe Jackson was mentioning on the red carpet of the BET Awards Sunday that caused such backlash by those who felt it was bad form in light of his son’s death only a couple days earlier?
Joe sat down to provide details exclusively to Hollywood Today Monday evening at a hotel not far from the family home in Encino with Jackson’s two partners in the new venture, Erick Hansen and Marshall Thompson.
The bottom line, plans are in the works for some music of Jackson’s children to be released on Blu-ray (the elder Jackson does not have any claim to recent rehearsal footage, according to legal representatives for the family who asked not to be quoted), but no discussion of anything to do with Michael was permitted as you’ll see in the accompanying 3 ½-minute video condensation of the half-hour interview.
As for the anger over Jackson’s timing of this announcement, the public will have to make up their own minds. The attorney said Jackson may be in a kind of post-traumatic stress haze where the death of his son has yet to sink in emotionally and will likely not truly hit him until Michael’s funeral service, which has yet to be scheduled by the family.
Hansen suggested (it’s in the video) that the elder Jackson needs to have this business venture to focus on as a distraction and a relief from the intense emotional strain and that getting back in the studio recording business will do him good.
Thompson, a founding member of the 1970s soul group The Chi-Lites, was with Jackson earlier Monday at a media briefing in front of the Jackson home as he tried to explain his perceived insensitivity Sunday while further plugging his new company and introducing Thompson as his partner.
Most viewers and many media members were so stunned and distracted by Jackson’s seeming exacerbating of the initial problem on Monday that even reputable news outlets were butchering the name of the companies involved with the new venture. CNN.com has several postings listing the name of the record company as “Ranch” or “The Ranch” and the Blu-ray company involved as Blue “Saw.”
In fact, as you can see in the video, the music label involving the partners is not “The Ranch” but Marantz, for which the Chicago-based Thompson is president and Jackson is chairman of the board.
The new label is set up to work in partnership with Hansen, who created a company called BlueStar Technologies in Spokane, Wash., in 2007, and calls his new venture with Jackson BlueStar (not “Blue Saw”) Disc Technologies.
The idea is to create a new music label that will find and launch new singers on all audio formats, including Blu-ray with enhanced features such as live Internet-connected chats with the artists as well as Jackson and Thompson. Hansen, a pioneer of such things as the first DVD-ROM videogame (1997’s “Wing Commander”) and the first use of the multi-angle feature of DVDs, said the new venture will soon introduce new technological innovations exploiting the more robust Blu-ray Disc format.
The partners are also working on the soundtrack to a feature film and are in negotiations with Italian soccer team AC Milan about creating a theme song for the club.
Although the primary focus of the new venture will be on original music, sources close to the family said that plans are being developed to tap the family’s rich mine of music from the 1970s that would include Michael, all to be announced in the near future. The record company created is called Marantz Records.
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