More profitable dead than alive (the "death clause")

Editor's note: A revealing documentary The Music Industry's Darkest Secret appeared that explores how the music industry really works, focusing on the long-standing manipulation of charts and the manufactured creation of "number one hits." From historic payola to modern tactics like bot-driven streams and views on platforms such as YouTube and Spotify, it raises an uncomfortable question about how fame is engineered and what the true cost of becoming a star might be. For decades, organized crime figures exerted behind-the-scenes control over parts of the rock music industry by dominating concert promotion, touring routes, and venue access, using coercion, kickbacks, and financial leverage to control which artists succeeded and how they were paid. RIP Bobby Fuller...makes you wonder what the fuck kind of a world we are living in?

It is less about law enforcement versus organized crime and more like a three-legged stool of power with the FBI, the CIA, and the mob publicly disavowing one another while through private intelligence networks and backchannels that "three-legged stool" stabilized the same corrupt system whenever it suited their financial interests. Considering the overlapping backchannels between intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and organized crime would have made hiring contract killers to knock off all these rock stars disturbingly easy. It would have all been handled quietly through intermediaries and proxies rather than overt criminal transactions:

Rethinking John Lennon's Assassination The FBI's War on Rock Stars By Salvador Astucia Chapter 1: The Crime Scene

Michael Jackson's death didn't just spark a temporary spike in sales, it transformed his catalog of music into a permanent profit machine, proving that the music industry continues to extract enormous, sustained value from his legacy long after he could no longer benefit from it himself.

It is the same with Prince. After his death in 2016, his music saw an immediate and dramatic surge in sales and revenue streams, with his music catalog flooding the charts, and in the years since it has continued to generate strong revenue reinforcing the pattern discussed in the documentary The Music Industry's Darkest Secret that major artists often become more commercially valuable to the industry after death (the "death clause") than during their later lives. "No one alerted you...."

And on and on it went, one rock star after another knocked off with "death clauses" driven by the brutality of ruthless greed...