M.J. $TAT $HEET

Friday marks the first anniversary of Michael Jackson's death, and this milestone has occasioned various assessments of Jackson’s posthumous clout. The Wall Street Journal’s Ethan Smith says that the Jackson estate has generated an estimated $200 million in the last year, allowing it to pay off tens of millions of dollars in debt and avert foreclosure on Encino complex where mom Katherine and his three kids live.

Credit goes to M.J.’s longtime lawyer, John Branca, and Michael’s friend John McClain, who are aggressively managing Jackson's affairs as a going concern, as Smith puts it. Jackson's absence from the equation has eliminated the chaos and out-of-control spending that reigned during his life.

According to Smith, the estate has collected as much as $125 million in royalties and advances from Sony Music, which has sold 31.5 million albums since M.J.’s death, with plans to distribute an album of previously unreleased music just in time for the holidays this year. Sony Pictures paid another $60 million for the rights to This Is It. Mijac, the publishing company that controls the copyrights to Jackson’s songs, is on track to generate $35 million in royalties, while the estate is set to collect $11 million in dividends from Sony/ATV. TV and merch deals could generate another $10 million, while deals to create a videogame and two Cirque du Soleil shows based on Mr. Jackson's music are set to provide additional revenue later this year. The Sony Music deal guarantees the estate sizable additional cash advances in coming years as well.

This influx of cash will come in handy in the repayment of a $300 million loan from Barclays, backed by his 50% stake in Sony/ATV, which matures at the end of the year.

In 2006, Jackson granted Sony an option to buy half of his stake in the pubbery at any time for a fixed price of $250 million. At the time that was a generous valuation, but Sony/ATV's value has since soared to around $2 billion.

The estate and Sony have held talks about whether the company will again guarantee a refinancing of the debt backed by Jackson's stake in Sony/ATV. If it won't, the estate could be forced to sell its stake at a steep discount, though that would still generate enough cash to wipe out the Barclays loan with hundreds of millions to spare, says Smith. But Sony may have an incentive to reach a deal on refinancing, because buying out Jackson's estate would require it to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for an asset it already effectively controls.

Meanwhile, Billboard’s estimates of the revenue generated in the last 12 months are are five times those of the Journal’s. According to the bible, MJ Inc. has generated at least $1 billion in revenue in the year following his death. It breaks down like this:

Music Sales: $429 million
Film/TV: $392 million
Publishing: $130 million
Licensing/Touring: $35 million
Recording Contract: $31 million