Bad news for fans of the King of Pop: The Facebook livestream of Michael Forever: The Tribute Concert has been canceled.

Facebook commerce outfit Milyoni had teamed up with Ridgeline Entertainment for the October 8 event from Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, which will be hosted by Jamie Foxx, with scheduled performers including Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, The Black Eyed Peas, Jennifer Hudson, and Smokey Robinson.

The event is still scheduled to proceed, but it won’t stream on Facebook. Milyoni explained in a statement:

Due to legal challenges brought by the music labels that own the rights to Michael Jackson’s lyrics, we have been notified by concert promoters Global Live Events and Ridgeline Entertainment that the live Facebook broadcast of the Michael Forever tribute concert has been canceled. As the technology provider behind the live Facebook broadcast, Milyoni will fully refund all customers who pre-purchased access to the concert using Facebook Credits or PayPal.

Milyoni Chief Executive Officer John Corpus added:

While social media presents a new opportunity for artists and concert promoters to reach global audiences, it is still a new and disruptive frontier ripe with challenges. Milyoni will continue to work closely with our music and entertainment partners to pursue this new channel of distribution, beneficial to both artists and fans worldwide.

If you’ve ever bought tickets for an event that got canceled, we’d love to hear from you in the comments section — what was the refund procedure like?

Michael Jackson became the most popular person on Facebook in July 2009, following his sudden death June 25 of that year. But will that help a pay-per-view concert in his honor convince people to shell out cash to watch it?

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Last week when Michael Jackson passed away I wrote about the tremendous growth in his Facebook Page as it transformed into a memorial site. Since then, the page has quadrupled in size and has increased in its rate of growth. As the chart below illustrates, his Page had around 2.9 million fans as of last night and by 11:15 AM EDT today he attracted 3,348,349 fans. Currently the largest Facebook Page is Barack Obama who has approximately 6.42 million fans but is only growing by a few thousand fans a day.
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