LOS ANGELES (AFP) - The tributes to Michael Jackson have been vast, global -- and may never happen for a musician again. In an age of iPods and "American Idol," the concept of a pop superstar has irrevocably changed.

To be sure, there are plenty of living musicians -- Bono, Mick Jagger, Madonna and Paul McCartney come to mind -- whose deaths would be mourned by fans around the world.

But music insiders wonder whether anyone will ever have the sheer hold on global pop culture as Jackson, who sold 750 million albums, virtually defined the music video and whose death made front pages in all but a dozen countries.

"Michael Jackson is not just the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop," said the Scottish songwriter and author Nick Currie, who performs under the stage name Momus.

Momus pointed to the rise of digital culture, which has fragmented music consumers into small, targeted audiences.

"Then there's the question of the sheer rarity of Jackson's combination of talents, his neurotic work drive and his eccentricity. Lightning like that takes a long time to strike twice," Momus told AFP.

Scott Plagenhoef, editor-in-chief of Pitchfork, the influential Chicago-based online music magazine, said the music industry was already floundering before Michael Jackson but was propped up by his seminal 1982 "Thriller" album and the advent of compact discs and music videos.

"But now with things like cable and satellite television, DVDs and video-games, there are just so many entertainment options," Plagenhoef said. "Music doesn't seem to have that central hold on youth and pop culture."

Websites such as Pitchfork now link fans with musicians, who can achieve fame -- at least for a niche -- without as much of the hand-shaking and self-promotion bemoaned by generations of embittered songwriters.

The hugely popular television series "American Idol" -- along with the British original "Pop Idol" and dozens of international spinoffs -- has taken the democratization of music to a new level, letting the public vote on a star.

"There is way less mystery and mystique with pop stars than there was in Michael Jackson's time," Plagenhoef said.

But Jerry Del Colliano, a professor of the music industry at the University of Southern California, said the world will always produce stars -- it just may be trickier to find a way to define them.

While no one will match Jackson's 750 million album sales figure, such a yardstick is irrelevant when fans can download music for free, he said.

"If the Michael Jackson of 'Thriller' came back from the dead, he would not be able to sell CDs because that's over," Del Colliano said.

"Records are dead, CDs are dead and legal downloads are dying," he said. "But let's push that aside -- would there be another Michael Jackson? Absolutely."

Del Colliano predicted that a future superstar would emerge from the world of social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

"It reminds me of the Olympics. We always say we can't do any better," Del Colliano said. "But there will always be an icon who has musical talent above all the rest of them, even if we change how it's delivered."

Momus, however, believes that social networking may have the opposite effect.

He said the world may be headed back to what celebrated sociologist Pierre Bourdieu found in 1960s France -- white-collar workers preferred high-brow classical music, while manual laborers listened to cheap pop.

"A few decades later, postmodern consumer culture had leveled that, at least superficially: now, people with college degrees spoke about Michael Jackson 'intelligently,' people from lower class backgrounds spoke about him 'passionately.' But everybody spoke about him," Momus said.

But social networking is now limiting interaction among groups with different tastes, Momus said.

"I think we'll see different classes embracing different cultures again. Things will settle back into the kind of cultural landscape Bourdieu described," he said. (By SHAUN TANDON)