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"This is it/Here I stand/I’m the light of the world/I feel grand."

There’s no mistaking the high- pitched voice counting off the intro. Listen more closely, though, and you might also hear the money men counting down until the tills begin to ring once more.

In his final days, Michael Jackson teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and struggled to toughen up for a gruelling series of concerts which, even before that fatal shot of Propofol, he appeared less and less likely to fulfil.

In death, predictably, Jackson’s stock has risen again. A concert documentary by Kenny Ortega, comprising rehearsal footage filmed at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, is now set for a theatrical release on October 28th. A double CD soundtrack is also in the works. To the music industry, the King of Pop is worth far more dead than he was alive.

The cornerstone of this posthumous moneymaking campaign is This Is It, the recently discovered "new" song. It streamed live on Jackson's website late last Sunday.

Gone are the heavyweight (and often heavyhanded) producers who dominated most of Jackson's later recordings, often drafted in to beef up material that wasn't up to scratch to begin with. What we get instead is a sweet, tender ballad that hearkens back to the best of Jackson's pre- Thrillerwork.

While the opening three lines – most notably the "light of the world" epithet – are typically Jacko Messianic, "I feel grand" sounds like something from a quaint show tune. And well it might, as it quickly transpired that This Is Itwas actually co-written in 1983 by Jackson and Paul Anka. This emerged only on Monday, after the New York Times and celebrity news website TMZ.com contacted Anka to point out the similarities. The song also featured on a 1991 album by r'n'b artist Sa-Fire.

Following a series of frank communications between the Jackson and Anka camps, royalties will no be evenly split.

This Is It is a testament to what Michael Jackson once was, rather than what he might have become again. But it is no less touching for that.