Michael Jackson had a mountain of unreleased recordings in the vault when he died - music that is almost certain to be packaged and repackaged for his fans in the years to come.

The material includes unused tracks from studio sessions of some of Jackson’s best albums, as well as more recently recorded songs made with Senegalese R&B singer and producer Akon and Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am.

“There are dozens and dozens of songs that did not end up on his albums,” said Tommy Mottola, who from 1998 to 2003 was chairman and CEO of Sony Music, which owns the distribution rights to Jackson’s music. “People will be hearing a lot of that unreleased material for the first time ever. There’s just some genius and brilliance in there.”

The releases, Mottola said, “could go on for years and years - even more than Elvis.”

Since Jackson’s death Thursday, there has been an enormous, almost unprecedented demand for the King of Pop’s music. Nielsen SoundScan said Wednesday that three of his records - “Number Ones,” “Essential Michael Jackson” and “Thriller - were the best-selling albums of the week, and 2.3 million tracks of his have been downloaded in the U.S. alone.

When a music star of Jackson’s stature dies, labels typically comb through their archives to pull out anything they can release. New compilations of recordings by performers such as Elvis, Tupac and Jeff Buckley are still released nearly every year.

Mottola, who has described himself as the “shepherd and gatekeeper” of Jackson’s catalog and is familiar with it better than anyone, said that for every album Jackson made - including classics like 1979’s “Off the Wall” and 1982’s “Thriller” - he recorded several tracks that didn’t make it onto the records.

(Mottola had only laudatory things to say about Jackson, who criticized Mottola in 2002 as a racist. Among those who defended Mottola at the time was the Rev. Al Sharpton.)

The details of who owns Jackson’s unreleased music and concert footage are not entirely clear. Sony Music declined to comment. A person involved with the label who requested anonymity said no new projects or compilations are being planned yet.

The Jackson family has not publicly discussed plans for Jackson’s catalog. In a 2002 will filed in court Wednesday, the pop star left his entire estate to a family trust, with his mother and his children named as beneficiaries.

Steve Gordon, an entertainment lawyer and author of “The Future of the Music Business,” worked at Sony Music during the 1990s. He said he was at Sony when Jackson’s last contract was negotiated, though he acknowledged it could have recently been updated.

Gordon said Jackson owns some of his master recordings, while others are owned in partnership with Sony. Regardless, he said, Sony retains exclusive distribution rights for anything Jackson produced during the term of their contract.

Gordon said he expects Sony’s Legacy Recordings division to do something similar to what it did with Elvis and create a division purely for Jackson’s catalog.

“They’ve done every kind of configuration to try to squeeze more money out of the catalog with Elvis and they’ll do it with Michael Jackson - be sure of it,” Gordon said. “I imagine that there’s a … load of concert recordings that may or may not have been released.”

Jackson’s last original album was 2001’s “Invincible.” His 2005 child molestation trial and other controversies distracted him from recording, but he was active in recent years.

He died just weeks before he was to perform 50 concerts at London’s O2 arena in what was supposed to be his comeback. He had also begun working on new material.

Two weeks before he died, he wrapped up work on an elaborate production dubbed the “Dome Project,” which could be the final finished video piece overseen by Jackson. Two people with knowledge of the project confirmed its existence Monday to The Associated Press on condition they not be identified because they signed confidentiality agreements.

Four sets were constructed for Jackson’s production, including a cemetery recalling his famous “Thriller” video. Shooting for the project lasted from June 1 to June 9. Now in post-production, the project is expected to be completed next month.

Last year, Jackson released “Thriller 25,” an album marking the 25th anniversary of the album. It included the new song “For All Time,” as well as five remixes that involved will.i.am, Kanye West, Akon and Fergie.

The Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am has said he and Jackson recorded several songs together. He told the BBC on Monday that Jackson had possession of their demos, and that the songs “demanded all the people to the dance floor.”

Akon had hoped to complete an album with Jackson once he finished his London concerts. The singer said they used to meet in Las Vegas whenever they had the time, and would talk on the phone constantly about ideas for the album.

Akon said they never actually completed a song except for “Hold My Hand,” which leaked last year. “All the other songs were just ideas,” Akon said.

He said he will keep the song fragments - a chorus here, a verse there - “locked up in the vault” until the Jackson family decides how to proceed. He said it could be worked into a tribute album.

“It was all positive records - songs to uplift people, songs to make people think about the problems in life,” Akon said. “It was all about bringing people together.”

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Jermaine Jackson says he would like to see Neverland Ranch as his brother Michael’s final resting place.

In an interview broadcast Thursday on NBC’s “Today” show, Jermaine Jackson also says he wishes he had died instead of his younger brother, and that Michael was “a gift from Allah.”

Says Jermaine: “He went too soon. I don’t know how people are going to take this, but I wish it was me.”

On Wednesday, Jackson family spokesman Ken Sunshine said a public memorial was in the works but it wouldn’t be held at Neverland.

A person familiar with the situation told the AP that permits for a burial at the sprawling Santa Barbara, Calif., estate could not be arranged in time.

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After much ditzy indecision and a full year in the planning, Rachel Hunter’s plans for her second marriage were at last ready. Her wedding dress was a daring number designed to show off her enviable 36in legs.

The guest list included such A-list luminaries as Michelle Pfeiffer and Sharon Stone, and a palatial hotel overlooking the Pacific in northern California had been booked for the reception.

The former wife of rocker Rod Stewart had approved the menu, after an eleventh hour change of pudding - strawberry pavlova, which is something of a private joke. Rachel laughingly describes the meringue dessert as just like her: hard on the outside and soft in the middle.

It was a joke she had planned to share with her guests during the speech she was adamant she would deliver at her star-studded wedding reception in less than two months’ time.

But the speech will go unheard. The wedding planners have been dismissed and the six-figure deal she struck with a celebrity magazine to cover the glitzy event has had to be scrapped.

The marriage is off. This week, Miss Hunter’s intended, Canadian-born ice hockey player Jarret Stoll, announced the nuptials have been cancelled in a curt, round-robin email sent to the 200 family and friends on the guest list.

Rachel is devastated. Not least because Stoll is refusing to tell her the exact reason why he has decided to call off the August 14 ceremony.

Friends were this week describing the New Zealand-born model as ’stunned and distressed’.

‘She’s been trying to put a brave face on things,’ a source close to Miss Hunter told me this week. ‘Rachel is doing her best to be chipper, but the reality is she’s been poleaxed by this. She’s confused and hurting.’

No wonder, given that just last month at a party in New York, Rachel, sporting her £60,000 diamond engagement ring, was talking excitedly about her wedding plans and telling fellow guests she was planning to have a baby.

‘Jarret will make an incredible dad,’ she said. ‘He’s a good person. He’s got a great sense of humour and gets on really well with my kids.’

So, what went wrong? Certainly, it seems - excuse the pun - that the ice hockey player got cold feet over the couple’s 13-year age gap.

Stoll, who celebrated his 27th birthday last week, is said by friends to have become ‘majorly freaked’ at the prospect that Rachel will turn 40 in September.

But sources are also divulging that the couple have clashed over his camp’s claims of her mood swings and ‘princess complex’ - a reference to Rachel’s high-maintenance tastes. For instance, they reveal she had changed the location of the wedding seven times.

And for all her public declarations that Stoll got on with her two children by Stewart - Renee, 17, and 14-year-old Liam - the teenagers’ relationship with their prospective stepfather is said to have soured in recent weeks.

Rachel’s desolation is compounded, say her friends, by the fact she had been hoping her marriage to Stoll would send out a message to Stewart that, after a string of disastrous relationships with unsuitable men, she was finally over their 1999 break-up.

‘This was meant to be the big break with Rod and the past,’ a long-time friend of Miss Hunter told me.

‘Rachel has spent most of the past ten years trying to define herself as someone other than just another of the many blonde former wives and girlfriends of Rod Stewart.

‘Because Jarret is well known in his own right in the U.S., she thought the marriage would help her move out of Rod’s shadow, but it was not to be.’

More pressingly, becoming Mrs Stoll would also have gone a long way to solving the financial insecurity that has dogged Rachel since her divorce from Stewart was finalised three years ago.

Rachel, who signed a pre-nuptial agreement before marrying the singer in 1990 when she was 21 and he was 45, is said to have got less than £5million from his £100million fortune.

She claims she has been forced to continue working since the split - though father-of-seven Stewart does provide generously for their children.

Stoll must have seemed a catch. Last year, he signed a four-year deal with the Los Angeles Kings ice hockey team worth close to £9million. The couple had recently moved out of Rachel’s relatively small Hollywood cottage to a £2.9million house in the upmarket district of Hermosa Beach.

Few will blame her if she has tired of the round of celebrity reality shows - including her 2005 appearance on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing - that has been her only obvious source of income in recent years.

Her modelling career, which saw her become one of the best-paid supermodels of the Nineties, is not what it was and her attempts to carve out a Hollywood career as an actress have fared even worse.

One of her films, the inauspiciously titled You And Your Stupid Mate, was described by one reviewer as ‘a stultifyingly unfunny comedy’. Recent attempts to schmooze West End producers, including Bill Kenwright, have come to nothing.

In the absence of a career in showbusiness, she has been reduced to trading on her name with a budget clothing range in New Zealand and posing naked for Playboy. It’s a comedown from the days when she appeared on the cover of Vogue.

It is not only when it comes to the subject of cash that the spectre of her famous former husband has loomed large in her life.

Certainly, she has found it difficult to find a man to match up to the charismatic, if controlling, Rod.

She has embarked on a series of unwise and short-lived affairs with a succession of famous, if toxic bachelors, including Robbie Williams, Pamela Anderson’s former husband Tommy Lee and rock frontman Wes Scantlin. She also dated another ice hockey star, Sean Avery, 11 years younger than her.

Her relationship with Scantlin ended in humiliation when he dumped her to begin dating her stepdaughter Kimberly Stewart, Rod’s 29-year-old daughter from his marriage to Alana Hamilton.

There were suggestions that Rachel’s relationship with Robbie Williams was a PR stunt after it was revealed newspaper pictures of a topless Hunter frolicking with the singer on a sun lounger were staged.

Rachel’s split with Stewart coincided with a round of partying and increasingly out-of-control drinking that forced her to give up alcohol five years ago. She recently admitted to feeling ‘ disconnected and lost’ and confessed how she goes off alone into a forest when she succumbs to depression.

But she has credited her relationship with Stoll, whom she met in 2006, with helping her cope with her demons.

Her long-time friend said of the split this week: ‘It’s all come as a massive shock, but a few of her friends have been trying to warn her she shouldn’t have waited so long to marry Jarret.

‘They’ve been engaged since last August and a year gives a man enough time to have second thoughts.

‘The past 12 months has been nothing but wedding planners, cakes, dresses, venues. Rachel kept changing her mind about every aspect of it. I think she wanted it to be just right.’

Sadly, it seems that in her preoccupation with organising the perfect big day, she forgot one fundamental - making sure the groom turns up.

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The oldest Jonas Bro, 22, popped the question to girlfriend Danielle Deleasa, 21, today, his rep confirmed.

He surprised Deleasa, a former hairdresser, with a cushion-cut diamond ring he codesigned with Jacob & Co. by showing up at her New Jersey home this morning.

The couple met in May 2007 while on vacation in the Bahamas with their families.

“Our hearts are filled with joy today and we are happy to share with you that our son Kevin has asked Danielle for her hand in marriage,” parents Denise and Kevin Jonas Sr. tell Us in a statement.

“Her answer was yes, and it is such a blessing that she will be joining our family. Kevin and Danielle have not yet set a date,” they continue. “Family is very dear to us, and we hope we have raised Kevin to be a wonderful man and husband. Please join us in our family’s celebration and in congratulating Kevin and Danielle. Thank you for all of your support.”

In 2008, Kevin told Details he was waiting until marriage to have sex, and wearing a promise ring from Tiffany’s in the meantime.

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Cover star, Mandy Moore, has been very quiet about her impromptu marriage to Ryan, but she opens up to WH on the subject in the July/August issue (on newsstand this week), and dishes about her recent album, misperception in the media, and her unexpected “good girl gone bad” behavior.

Misperceptions of Mandy:

“I understand people have preconceived notions of who I am or what I do. But I do find it bizarre that people find it bizarre that I’ve grown up.”

The “Big” Wedding:

“It was never important for a wedding to be about anything other than me and my partner. A big celebration was never my cup of tea.”

On marriage:

“I didn’t know if marriage was something that was super important to me. I thought, maybe I don’t need that in my life.”

“I didn’t take the decision (to get married) lightly. I ventured into it realistically. But life takes you places you wouldn’t have expected. I’m really content with what was in the cards for me.”

Her married life:

“We’re quiet people who live a normal, boring life.”

On Therapy (which she first tried over a year ago):

“You go in thinking, ‘Wow, I have nothing to talk about. Where is this hour gonna go? And before you know it, time’s up. I don’t have to burden my friends with the same things over and over again, and it’s fascinating to get an unbiased point of view, to not feel like anybody would judge you. It’s very freeing.”

Mandy’s unexpected tattoo on the arch of her foot:

“It’s a baby sperm.”

Tattoo parlor visit with her band members:

“We were goofing off, writing a song about babies or something,” she says. “Somehow that evolved into everybody getting inked.

Unexpected Paparazzi run-in:

“It was like 9 in morning, I’m having my period, I have a huge pimple on my face, and all of a sudden some guy pops out from behind a porta-potty.”

*Occurred the morning of the interview while her and her hubby were hiking

Head-over-heels for Ryan:

Mandy calls Ryan, “my best friend, someone I have so much respect for.”

Making of Amanda Leigh:

“I’d never sung sitting down before but there was something so intimate about the way we were doing the record. It was just the three of us, and we made the most of what we had. Typically, in a studio, every day you’re conscious of how much money it’s costing but there was no pressure. It was like, let’s go for this song today, and we’d come back to it later.”

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Do you remember Karen Mulder? She was one of the supermodels of the 1990’s. She used to earn almost $20,000 a day at her peak. Today she is sitting in a French jail for repeatedly calling the office of her plastic surgeon and wanting some procedure reversed. According to French police, Mulder allegedly called and “was screaming and shouting about the operation and became extremely threatening. There were repeated calls to the female surgeon who was extremely scared. The suspect is being interviewed.”

Mulder, who is 39 has long suffered from depression. In fact according to the Daily Telegraph, Mulder “attended a psychiatric hospital in 2001 suffering from chronic depression, blaming it on drug addiction during her modeling days.”

She has also attempted suicide at least once since she retired from modeling.

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The NY Post is reporting that salary figures for Simon Cowell’s renewal of his American Idol contract are leaking. This past year he made $36M for his five months of work being a judge on Idol. For his next contract he would like a raise to the tune of $144M for his five months on the show. Umm, that is a ridiculous f**king amount of money for someone who speaks about 6 minutes for every hour he is on the air. To be fair, lets say there are about 25 episodes of Idol. In addition to those there are the audition cities where Simon has to put in almost an 8 hour day four or five times with only cigarette breaks, lunch breaks, coffee breaks and whatever breaks he wants.

Then there are the Hollywood days and then the show itself. Lets see if we can get a total for all of this.

We will be very conservative.

10 audition days at 8 hours a day equals 80 hours.
4 Hollywood days at 8 hours a day equals 32 hours.
25 shows at 4 hours a show equals 100 hours.
Promotions, press for the show equals 20 hours.

Total hours on the show 232 hours over the course of five months. Salary $144M which equals about $620,000 an hour. Minimum wage varies in the United States from state to state, but in California it is $8 an hour unless you work in San Francisco.

At $8 an hour, it would take a worker 77,500 hours just to make what Simon is going to make for one hour working on American Idol. The average number of hours worked in a year for most people is 2,000.

What this means is that if you are a minimum wage earner in California and work 40 hours a week for 39 years you will earn what Simon Cowell earns for one hour of judging American Idol. This doesn’t sound very fair does it? And remember my estimates were conservative. Plus, the work that minimum wage earner is performing is much harder than saying, “I didn’t like it.” Oh, and the minimum wage earner probably doesn’t have health insurance either and probably can’t afford to go anywhere on their two weeks of vacation each year, if they even get any vacation.

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According to Entertainment Weekly, Drea de Matteo is set to join the cast of Desperate Housewives. Guess what? Drea is going to play an Italian housewife. I know, I know, the stretch on her acting talent is going to be tough. Now, she is going to play the matriarch of her family which is more than she did on The Sopranos, but I wish they would have let her play someone besides an Italian housewife. I have seen her do that already. Not the married part so much, but the rest of it.

When I first read she was cast, I was hoping they would show some creativity and imagination. I think she is a great casting choice because she can cause trouble and be tough and at the same time be sexy. But, the imagination that led to the casting didn’t stretch far enough to see her as anything other than what she has already played for years. Does Drea want to play the same roles for the rest of her career? She is too good of an actress to keep getting stereotyped like this. I will say that I am going to watch the first episode of the season. Do you think maybe she could order a hit on Eva’s character?

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