Before the infamous club fight last week, Chris Brown sat down with Esteban Serrano of Fuse to discuss his upcoming album Fortune. He shared details on the creative process behind the project, how he uses iTunes to shop his excess music, his favorite performance, and how he almost collaborated with Michael Jackson before his death in 2009.

On performing a tribute to Michael at the 2006 World Music Awards
“I was 17. My first time ever performing in London and I did a tribute to Michael Jackson for ‘Thriller’ but he was there. That’s the first night I met him.

“That was probably one of my greatest moments in my career because I got a chance to perform for him. People loved the performance. I went backstage and met him. He said hi to my mom. He was respectful. It was just one of those great times in my life.”

On nearly collaborating with Michael
“That was my expectation. That was my goal. Me and him had talked countless times through our people. We were working on records and we were working on some stuff. But being the situation, God has other plans.”

On being compared to Michael
“For me, my legacy is not to be Michael Jackson, but to just be me. I want to make him proud. I don’t want to make it an effort to copy because I hate clones, so I don’t want to be a clone.”

And for all you artists out there, Chris explained his business model for working with iTunes to make money off of the large volume of music he records.

“I have something called “rarities and B-sides… I have a gang of records. So what I do is, I give them to iTunes. Instead of releasing it free, for a lesser price you get it. It gives an artist a chance to get the exposure that they need. There might be a producer you never worked with, but instead of going through the label riff raff and all the bull, you say, ‘Look, let’s split the royalty and do it like this so we both get paid.’”

Chris will perform at this year’s BET Awards on July 1, right before the release of Fortune on July 3.