His sales have drifted downward for years, but Michael Jackson's bouts of public weirdness may not be to blame.

In fact, they've occasionally slowed the decline, industry experts said yesterday.

"Ironically enough, when there was that incident where he held the infant over the balcony in Berlin, we had a spike in sales (of his CD Invincible)," said Ken Kozey, president of the Retail Music Association of Canada.

But as Kozey added, that incident was nothing like the latest batch of trouble Jackson is in.

In terms of sales, Kozey said, there is a minimal amount of harm Jackson's imminent child-molestation charges can do, because "clearly he's not anywhere near the peak of his career. I can tell you his latest release is not the first thing on our radar screen."

According to Soundscan, in recent years his Canadian sales have ranged from about 30,000 (for 1997's Blood On The Dancefloor) to about 100,000 each for 2000's The Best Of Michael Jackson and 2001's Invincible.

In an example of another sex scandal, R. Kelly seemed untouched by a charge last year of child pornography based on an Internet sex video. He sold 600,000 albums the week after the scandal broke.

Reps for Sony Canada, which carries Jackson's albums, were unavailable for comment.

But Universal Music has carried plenty of behavioral problem children, including Guns N' Roses, Nirvana, Courtney Love and Limp Bizkit.

Randy Lennox, president of Universal Music Canada, predicted yesterday that the freakish publicity might give Jackson's record sales "a tiny jump, but certainly not exponential."

In the case of Love, her best-selling album Live Through This coincided with the worst of her scandals -- including the revelation in a Vanity Fair article that she took LSD while pregnant, and the subsequent temporary loss of baby Frances Bean to child-care authorities. Love's next album, Celebrity Skin, sold half as well.

In the cases of Kelly and Jackson, Lennox said that "it becomes, unfortunately, an issue of sexual orientation and a double standard -- an underage girl vs underage boy. It's a huge difference in some people's minds."

Diminishing returns

Michael Jackson's worldwide earnings from each of his solo albums, through 2002, according to Forbes magazine: