In the words of someone from Epic Records, “[the] world premier of “Much Too Soon” on Ping – “Much Too Soon” was written at the time of Thriller.  Michael always liked the song but never found the right home for it; here is finds its place as the bittersweet closing to the stellar collection.”

Michael Jackson is back with yet another unreleased song from the grave.  His new track, “Much Too Soon” is a tear-jerket for sure, yet if it weren’t MJ, there’s no way I’d be writing about it.

The song premiered tonight on Michael Jackson’s Ping page, which in and of itself is a head-scratcher.  I guess that Epic Records is trying to tap into the new social network, as opposed to releasing the track via Facebook where he has over 24 million “likes.”  The song only has 34 comments after 5 hours.

There’s been some pretty substantial growth on this particular artist page, even in the past hour, when his followers went from 56,981 to 58,315.  I’m sure we’ll find out relatively soon why they chose to premier the song to a limited audience as opposed to the 10 billion people on Facebook.

The new album, entitled Michael is dropping on December 14th.  You can pre-order it here.