• The Michael biopic has driven Jackson’s catalog to 181.6 million U.S. streams in a single week — his personal best by a wide margin
• Thriller has returned to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart for the first time since 1984, now with 38 total weeks at the top
• \”Billie Jean\” has climbed to No. 17 on the Hot 100, 43 years after its original release
• The Essential Michael Jackson hit No. 1 on the U.K. albums chart for the first time since 2009, when it surged following Jackson’s death
• The chart boom arrives alongside renewed legal scrutiny, as the Cascio family’s sexual abuse lawsuit draws fresh attention

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Three weeks into its theatrical run, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael is doing something no marketing campaign could manufacture: it’s making a dead man’s decades-old music feel brand new again. Not just on one chart, not just in one country — everywhere, all at once, in numbers that are genuinely hard to wrap your head around.

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For the tracking week of May 1–7, Jackson’s solo catalog registered 181.6 million official on-demand song streams in the United States alone, according to data platform Luminate. That’s a 32% jump from the prior week’s 137.6 million — which was itself a 146% improvement over his then-record of 55.9 million weekly streams. He’s broken his own personal best three weeks in a row. Early data for the following week already showed 86 million streams logged in just three days (May 8–10), putting a 200-million-stream week within reach.

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\”Billie Jean\” is leading the charge. Originally released on January 2, 1983 as the second single from Thriller, it held the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks and made Jackson the first artist ever to simultaneously top all four of Billboard’s major pop and R&B charts. Now, 43 years later, it’s back — rocketing from No. 38 to No. 17 on the Hot 100, topping newer releases from Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber in the process. The song has also climbed to No. 2 on Spotify’s global chart and currently sits at 2.7 billion total streams on the platform. It is, by every measure, still his biggest song — and it’s proving it all over again.

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\”Beat It,\” \”Human Nature,\” and \”Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough\” have all returned to the Hot 100 as well, with \”Beat It\” and \”Human Nature\” finishing second and third behind \”Billie Jean\” in Jackson’s catalog for the week with 11.4 million and 10.8 million plays respectively.

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Thriller Is Making History — Again

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The album that started it all is back on top. Thriller has reclaimed No. 1 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart for the first time since 1984, earning 62,000 equivalent album units in the May 1–7 tracking week — a 36% jump from the week before, driven by 50.3 million streams. That brings Thriller’s total weeks at No. 1 on that chart to 38, extending its own record for the most weeks at the top by a male artist. (SZA’s SOS holds the overall record with 46 weeks, having surpassed Thriller’s original 37-week run in June 2025.)

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On the Billboard 200, the numbers are just as striking. Thriller has climbed into the top five. The greatest-hits collection Number Ones has entered the top 10 for the first time ever. The Essential Michael Jackson jumped from No. 158 to No. 88. Off the Wall and Dangerous have both reentered the chart. And on the Top Album Sales chart, Thriller jumped from No. 48 to No. 7 — while also crossing 500 total weeks on that chart, a milestone reached by only three other albums in history: Bob Marley’s Legend, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Chronicle, and Nirvana’s Nevermind.

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This is all happening in the biopic’s third week of release. That’s not a opening-weekend spike. That’s a sustained cultural moment.

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The U.K. Is Feeling It Too

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Across the Atlantic, the effect is equally pronounced. The Essential Michael Jackson has returned to No. 1 on the U.K. albums chart — the first time it’s held that position since 2009, when it spent seven weeks there in the immediate aftermath of Jackson’s death. Thriller has jumped to No. 6 and Bad has climbed back into the top 10 for the first time in 14 years. Jackson has also debuted on the U.K. Official Dance Singles Chart for what Forbes reports is his most active year yet on that tally — not a chart where his music has historically been classified, but apparently one where it belongs.

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Even Janet Is Getting a Boost

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Here’s a detail that says everything about the reach of this moment: Janet Jackson, who doesn’t appear in the biopic and isn’t even mentioned in it, is seeing her own streaming numbers rise. According to sister La Toya, Janet “kindly declined” to be depicted in Michael. But for the week ending May 7, her catalog still amassed over 9.4 million official on-demand U.S. streams — her best weekly total of 2026, up 31% from two weeks earlier. A healthy portion of that comes from \”Scream,\” the duet she recorded with her brother, which pulled in nearly 1.2 million plays on its own. Even stripping that song out, her catalog is still up 20% from the prior period.

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Which raises a question that feels increasingly inevitable: could a Janet biopic be next?

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The Shadow the Biopic Doesn’t Acknowledge

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The chart triumph arrives alongside a legal story that the film itself pointedly ignores. Michael has been widely criticized for sidestepping the abuse allegations that have followed Jackson’s legacy for decades, and a new lawsuit is making that omission harder to overlook.

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In February, four siblings from the Cascio family — who were described as something of a second family to Jackson — filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual abuse spanning more than a decade. The complaint alleges that \”Michael Jackson was a serial child predator who, over the course of more than a decade, drugged, raped, and sexually assaulted each of the Plaintiffs, beginning when some of them were as young as seven or eight.\” The family says Jackson groomed them and manipulated them into silence, and that their years of publicly defending him were a product of that grooming.

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Jackson’s estate has pushed back hard. Attorney Martin Singer called the lawsuit \”a desperate money grab\” and noted that the Cascio family \”staunchly defended Michael Jackson for more than 25 years, attesting to his innocence.\” Singer added: \”These shakedown attempts come more than 15 years after Michael’s death, thus carrying no risk of being sued for defamation. Sadly, in death just as in life, Michael’s talents and success continue to make him a target.\” The estate previously reached a settlement with the family in 2019.

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It’s the tension that sits underneath all of this — a catalog shattering streaming records, a biopic crossing half a billion dollars at the global box office, and a legacy that remains as contested as it is celebrated.

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For now, the numbers keep climbing. And if the early streaming data for week four holds, Michael Jackson may be about to break his own record again.

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“category”: “Music

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