They’re not wrong: Jackson’s deep well of talent and charisma, his sense of the total pop performance, and his well-chosen cadre of collaborators made him the King of Pop.

But his kingdom had been dismantled around him by the time of his death.

It probably started sometime in the early 1990s, the last moment of Jackson’s real power over record-buying audiences.

After that was Napster and the following tide of file-sharing; corporate consolidation of record labels, radio, and music venues, and the concomitant lack of any oversight over the spending habits and business models of the majors; the disappearance of the local record shop, followed quickly by the disappearance of the chain-megastore record shop. Superstars are simply less super these days, while artists still oddly called “indie” are making more money than their college-rock or alternative ancestors could ever have dreamed, and hogging up too much of the market to leave room for a King. The kingdom of pop is now a capitalist republic.

If you’d pointed your Web browser to NPR.org in the past couple of weeks, you might have found yourself listening to a live stream of Wilco’s seventh studio album, perhaps the band’s best. Out today, it’s called Wilco (The Album) and leads off with the track “Wilco (The Song),” as a bizarre kind of Spaceballs tribute.
If you had taken yourself hence to the band’s Web site, where the album had streamed a few weeks before, you’d have found lots of information about the album, the band, upcoming tours, news, and an iPhone app as the cherry on top.

Also on NPR’s site last week, you might have found yourself listening to an interview with Matchbox Twenty lead singer Rob Thomas, whose sophomore solo release is also out today. Moving thence to his Web site would have linked you to streams of his album on VH1.com and Rhapsody, the music download and listening site, as well as to scores of interviews, photos, and more, and even a new track exclusively available on iTunes for a premium price of $1.29.

These are the results of a revolution in the music business that is long completed. But the notion that the ultimate indie-Americana outfit, the scrappily splendid Wilco, and the certified platinum popster Thomas, best known for his duet with Carlos Santana, the tellingly titled “Smooth,” should share practically identical marketing models is worth noting. Selling oneself in the wired era isn’t some sort of magic formula available only to Radiohead and Trent Reznor. It’s everywhere, as artists adapt faster than the crumbling major labels can. They are saving pop one band at a time, and so the spoils will be divided among those who do the work.

Wilco has never had a Top 40 single, and while they are signed to a subsidiary of a major label, how they got there is a world away from the Olympian stature of Thomas, whose tenure with Matchbox Twenty and solo career has been a mainstream mainline all the way.

In the mid-’90s Reprise signed the fledgling indie Wilco seeking riches from the alternative craze like many of the other majors. By the time of its breakthrough, 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco had grown into a successful touring band (selling out 2,000-seat venues without much trouble and making a good living), but its albums weren’t stellar sellers, and so Reprise had grown tired.

When Yankee Hotel Foxtrot displeased Reprise executives, they released the band and, as though to show no hard feelings, allowed it to keep the album.

The band decided to digitally stream the album on its Web site, in this state of corporate limbo, mainly to shore up interest in an upcoming tour. Streaming an entire record was practically unheard of, and if the band had still been on Reprise, it is unlikely to have been permitted.

Hundreds of thousands of listeners came, far more than the band ever expected. Nonesuch Records picked them up (they’re still signed there), a label which is, coincidentally, a division of Warner Bros., just like Reprise.

Warner Bros. had now paid for the album twice. But it was only because of the band’s own intervention that the album sold twice as many copies as any of its previous efforts on Warner. Giving away the music had worked. It’s a formula that still puts Wilco at the leading edge of the pop music business, honed to sharpness since the band’s first stab in 2002. The band still makes most of its money on the road, and knows that all the streams and the iPhone apps do is to get their songs into the ears of potential ticket-buyers (of course, to record buyers, too, but that hardly matters from a business point of view). Sales going up means concerts sell out, and these days Wilco can sell out venues much larger than 2,000-seaters.

Wilco (The Album) takes the lessons of early mission statements and later experiments and fashions songs that feel like a band based on flux is starting over with the lessons of its wanderings fully in mind. The country-rock classicism of A.M. and Being There, the chamber-populism of Summerteeth, and the crackled brilliance and deep grooves of YHF and A Ghost Is Born and even the frazzled comedowns on Sky Blue Sky are all mapped onto the sound. It’s mainly a grim affair, pinioning between melancholic love—via sweet, syrupy folk rock like the Feist-Tweedy duet “You and I” (“However close we get sometimes/ it's like we never met”)—and all-out murder—“Bull Black Nova” (“Blood on the sofa/ blood in the sink/ blood in the trunk”) a squalling, relentless wash of noise and force owing much to Nels Cline’s fresh, ambitious guitar work. Yet in the end, the album seems resolved, after 11 songs, to a kind of tense optimism. It’s an apt metaphor for the arc of their career.

In addition to his NPR Q&A, Rob Thomas partnered with VH1 and Rhapsody to stream his new album, Cradlesong, for the past two weeks prior to its release. He offered exclusive tracks on Rhapsody, hosted a Twitter “contest,” and presented an “innovative advertising campaign” aimed at hard-core Thomas fans and utilizing anecdotes and trivia from throughout his career to appeal directly to his fan base.

In the press release, Thomas is quoted: “Working with Rhapsody and VH1 has been a unique experience, enabling me to interact with even more of my fans. All of the different aspects of this campaign will allow me to reach an even bigger audience.”

It’s hard to take seriously the notion that a multi-platinum artist (sales of more than 80 million albums) could expect to attract a larger audience by going online. Two of the truisms of the Internet are that an abundance of options oddly narrows the perspective of most potential customers and that even a “multi-platinum artist” utilizes the Web mainly to create a direct connection with existing fans.

It’s not as though Wilco is reaching out to Black Eyed Peas fans, or that Mr. Thomas is trying to recruit the Belle & Sebastian set. Both are simply trying to connect with listeners who are already out there, already online, who already like them. It’s a question of converting that avid fan base into money. And that’s one thing Jackson didn’t have to worry about.

The first-week totals for these two artists are bound to be fairly divergent, but solid in their own ways. Neither will scrape the mass, intersubjective consciousness of the public the way Michael Jackson did. Mass communication, the vehicle of superstardom, is too fractured, too specialized, to allow that for the real pop stars of the moment.

The King of Pop is dead; long live the Republic.

The party was a co-production of The New York Observer and YouTube, and lasted till after 11 p.m.

"They let me out of the cage just for tonight," beamed Steve Marchese, managing director of the annual awards ceremony that is the signature public event of the week.

Click on the right for a slideshow of scenes from the party: More will be added later so check back in!

Andrea Chalupa and Ariston Anderson from Walletpop.com were doing a sort of roving duo act throughout much of the evening.

"Being addicted to the Internet, it gives us an excuse to go out," Ms. Chalups said. "It gets us away from our keyboard."

And there were other reasons to be out last night.

"You think Internet people are really weird and awkward," Ms. Anderson said, scanning the room. "But they're really hot."

"This is the biggest tech party I've been to in a long time!" said Caroline McCarthy, the big shot tech reporter for CNET News. "I feel like [Internet people] are crawling out of their shells."

"There was this attitude in the tech industry. ... It was dwarfed by the finance world, but since that's recently been diminished, it's like there's a void to fill and tech people are doing that."

"It's a new generation—people who know how to do technical things are cool now," said Pas Niratbhand, art director of Schecky's Media. "We're gonna take over the world."

Less diamond and more gruff is the silho of a devilish-looking Charlie Rangel peeping out of the lower-right corner of the page. He's looking surly because the mayor is yelling at him for a joke he made about President Barack Obama's Greatest Date Night Ever, which transpired Saturday night and involved restaurant and Broadway, which pretty much makes the Obamas no more sophisticated than any other tourists who come to New York. So Mr. Rangel advised the president to avoid East Harlem, where he believes tensions could be on the wax over the "friendly-fire" shooting of a black police officer by a white one. Ask the locals! According to the teaser text on the front page of the Post, it's Mr. Rangel who has been laying low since his unfortunate remarks, which have earned him the sobriquet "CHARLIE WRONGEL" on this morning's wood.

Daily News: That's one way to cover the story of Omar Edwards, the police officer who was shot dead by fellow officer Andrew Dunton four days ago. And the News does give Mr. Rangel's comments (and Mr. Bloomberg's scolding) a little space at the bottom of its cover story. But today's News is dominated by a report from the police-firefighter football match at which the late Edwards would have been a star. A football enthusiast who cherished major-league football dreams, he was a star player on the police's football team; his department's win against the firemen has resulted in a trophy that will be left to his widow. On the cover, "HE'S A HERO" is the main hed, over a picture of fellow officer Robert Lavender hoisting his fallen comrade's No. 23 jersey. "NYPD teammates win for slain cop," reads the dek. It's more than half the page, vertically, and, well, the layout is not brilliant. The text doesn't seem to fill the space properly; sometimes white space is nice, but this is a tabloid, no? It seems like this is the kind of piece you could have given even more room to, and the display would have worked out better dimensionally.

Because very little is gained with the paper's use of the rest of its space: a red box with knockout type declares, "'Twilight' shines at MTV awards." Oh, there is also a bullet point underneath. Are you following us? "Plus 'Bruno's' full moon!" What can that mean? Last night's stupid joke in which Sasha Baron Cohen's mincing Austrian descends butt-first onto the face of notoriously fag-bashy "rapper" Eminem has gotten enough ink already. For now I'll just point out: Is it really the gays who win in this kind of reverse-baiting of career homophobes? O.K., enough about "Bruno, Not Good for the Gays." I don't want to get too earnest. WAIT A MINUTE: "ABORT DOC KILLED IN CHURCH," the News declares across the bottom of the front page. "SEE PAGE 8." Or, you know, don't. If there's anything new there, they didn't bother to flag it.

General observations: I'm tempted to call this essentialy a "bye" in favor of the News, since the Post gives up so much of its front page to a promotion that will only entice people nobody needs as readers. But "WRONGEL" is pretty great in that way that groaners are on the front of the Post. And the News front page is just bizarre: It looks like they stuck in a cover story and then went to Digg to figure out what tons of people had already read about on the Internet to fill in the blanks. Still, we appreciate that the News found something reportable about the friends and coworkers of the slain cop where the Post piled on to this manufactured dispute between Michael Bloomberg and Charlie Rangel that tells you nothing new about either of them. So!

Winner: Daily News

The New York Post: Welcome back, holidaymakers! While we've been away the tabloids have been hard at it: there's been more swine flu and even a giant tiny scary terrorist plot! We will just have to see if we have the opportunity to talk about those Woods in the coming days. Looking at this morning's editions, though, I was reminded of something a big editor at one of the tabloids said to me a few years ago now. This editor was talking to a young person, not a "media type," about work. "Oh, so you do like yesterday's news?" the youngster said, apparently without any malice intended. It was just: that's what you are for! We talked about this for a while, but this morning's papers demonstrate the problem quite nicely.

The basic circumstances that may make a story impossible to put on the cover of your newspaper on a given morning are not in the control of the editors: How is the paper distributed? When does it have to reach trucks/planes to get that distribution? When does printing have to start for the paper to reach the trucks? If it happens past that time, there's not much you can do to get your big breaking story in print for another 24 hours. Of course, you can get stuff up on the Web. But does that help? I don't have this information, but would love to know what the crossover is between print and online readership for the News and the Post: if you've read either of them on the subway in the morning, how likely are you, when you want news, to check the same publications online? The fact is that the "paper" you'll see at either site (moreso at nydailynews.com than at nypost.com) often bears little or no resemblance to the paper edition printed that morning. But do readers understand that? What I am getting at is, how do the tabloids communicate to their existing readers that they are not in the business of "yesterday's news"? Not easy.

There is one thing that editors can do however, which is to change the basis of their cover decisions in deference to the facts of the 24-hour, television and internet-driven news environment. I'm going to take as an example the bomb blast at the Upper East Side Starbucks. This happened in the early-morning hours of Monday, too late by far to make yesterday's print editions. And unions and editorial staffs being what they are, the Post's Memorial Day staffing may well not have been everything the paper's news editors might have wished. It's a big story! A bomb, right in the central business district of the template New York Post reader. But this was a live event: further newsbreaks are all going to be leaks from the police. Not exactly much hope for a blockbuster advance on the story. And it wasn't a very dramatic explosion. So, if you're the editor of the Post, do you decide that this story is too big to have never appeared on the cover of your paper? Or do you decide to let it go from the front page and find something else a little fresher to sell the page? Today the Post made the sentimental choice. Is that decision about library archives, about posterity? Since when is that a motivator for tabloid newspapers? If it's not—if it's a real news decision about what readers need to see in the morning on the front of their newspaper—then it's the wrong one. Literally more than 24 hours of coverage on NY1 and even some of the major national cable networks, and online at nypost.com and nytimes.com has been available to anyone who cared to read beyond the headline on this story. It's, unfortunately for those of us with some sentimental attachments to newsprint, yesterday's news.

Not so the sad story of reemerged celebrity Mike Tyson's four-year-old daughter, who is fighting for her life after an accident on a treadmill. We've always admired the Post's willingness to do what Us Weekly always makes a big production of doing: shilling the idea that the stars are, in a way, just like us. Their personal tragedies are like the kinds of things your aunt's very unlucky circle of acquaintances always have happening to them. These are the "relatable moments" in the lives of the big stars. But at its worst moments, you hold up a copy of the Post with a story like this dominating the front page (typographically, at any rate) next to the "supermarket" tabloids that are still talking about Liz Taylor, and you have a hard time telling the difference. We're not being taste police on behalf of Mr. Tyson, but on behalf of the reader. Note to New York Post: This is to be avoided. Do the Tyson story. Just not like this.

Our regular readers know we have to go to friends to double check anything we say about sports and sports coverage; they're not around yet though! So we will just note the freaky fact that the Post this morning pumps up the Mets, while the Daily News...

Daily News:"High 5 for A-Rod!" screams the News, which is of late very warm toward the maligned slugger. "Perfect day at plate silences Texas boo birds," the paper continues. Observer.com will have more to say shortly about the massive operation that is working to recover Mr. Rodriguez's reputation after revelations he tested positive for human growth hormones while playing in Texas; but on its face we do wonder whether any of these accusations are really put to rest simply because A-Rod has some successes on the field? We also wonder, retrospectively, whether the little line "METS DOWN NATS" that's offered as a refer here, considering that the Post gave the Mets a big box and didn't mention A-Rod or the Yanks on its front page at all, constitute a sign of a coming realignment: the News has always been more of a "boroughs" paper, which would tend it toward coverage of the Mets, while the Post (Rupert Murdoch's working relationship with Howard Rubinstein, who also reps the Yankees notwithstanding), normally the elitist among the two, has always tended to give short shrift to the Mets compared to the Yankees. Is this changing?

"'A GRAVE THREAT.'" So did President Barack Obama characterize North Korea's "A-bomb test." "NUKE CRISIS SPECIAL REPORT - SEE PAGES 8-9" the News promises. Well, it's the big, big story so why not? We sometimes think a story is too big to be subjected to the analysis for the New York tabloids that will always favor local stories to national ones. The Post had a nice run writing scathing critiques of the U.N., depicting the security council in photomontage as weasels in suits. This is how the News goes national, and it's ... a bore. But, you know, isn't a bomb that sets off an explosion analogous to the one that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki bigger news than a few broken windows at an Upper East Side Starbucks?

General observations: We think this morning's front pages demonstrate the News' more sophisticated handling of the 24-hour news cycle, and the complicated matrix of local versus national news for city tabloids. They also demonstrate the News' inability to make a super important and interesting story seem, well, interesting or important. Still ...

Winner (updated): Daily News*. But, as with A-Rod's name in the hall of fame, today's win comes with an asterisk. An error I saw on a digital version of the paper, of the sort that usually gets corrected at the plant if no later than that, appears to have made it into print editions spotted in, at least, Eastern Queens and in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. The subheading on the A-Rod story seems to have been copied and pasted a half inch or so up and to the right of the original, marring the image. This is a big, big error, though one not attributable, I think, to the same people who are normally at war in this column. Still, the newsstand is what counts. And on the newsstand, the News looks like a big lemon this morning. Click here to see the error.