Here's an excerpt from "Making Michael"
"In January 1975, Motown released Michael’s fourth solo album, Forever, Michael. The album performed poorly, peaking at 101 on the Billboard 200 chart. This was eight places lower than Michael’s previous album of two years earlier, Music and Me, which includes songs such as the title track and ‘With a Child’s Heart’. Neither album reached the top 50 in the United Kingdom, selling poorly at a time when The Jackson 5’s record sales as a whole were declining. The group felt Motown was holding them back, not allowing them to write or produce their own music or play their own instruments.
They were unhappy with the sound of their music, and there was a real concern that more contemporary groups would overtake them if something didn’t change. “We want to try different things; we want to grow,”Michael explained. “It’s like the caterpillar must come out of the cocoon and be a butterfly. We have to try different things and grow and become all those different colours and elements and things like that. We’ve always wanted to write on Motown but it was never in our contract. And we could have changed our contract at Motown. But I don’t think people had confidence in us; they didn’t believe in us. They say, ‘Oh, you guys [are] just kids. Just go behind the mike’.
Neither Michael’s father Joseph nor his brothers spoke out about the issue, so Michael felt it was up to him to confront Berry Gordy about their feelings. But after meeting Gordy at his Bel Air mansion, Michael was told in no uncertain terms that the group’s songs would still be controlled by Motown’s writers and producers. If the brothers wanted to progress there was only one choice left, and that was to leave the label altogether.
Joseph and his attorney, Richard Arons, began began looking for a new record deal and chose to sign with CBS Records, headed by the volatile New Yorker Walter Yetnikoff, in the summer of 1975. CBS offered a royalty rate of 27% of the wholesale price for each record sold in the United States, compared with Motown’s standard 2.7%; and although Yetnikoff was sceptical about allowing the brothers to write and produce all of their own music, there would be more creative opportunities there than at Motown.
Life at CBS didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts; first the group were forced to change their name to The Jacksons, as Motown laid claim to the ‘Jackson 5’name. Jermaine also felt compelled to leave the group and stay with Motown and release solo albums, having married Berry Gordy’s daughter Hazel in 1973. He was replaced by the youngest Jackson brother, fourteen-year-old Randy, who had been an unofficial member of the group since 1972, playing congas onstage as part of their live act."