This might sound strange. But even after his death, Michael Jackson has been making and breaking records in the music charts. He is coming off one of the biggest years of his career after selling more than 9 million albums and nearly 13 million digital tracks in the United States in the year since his death. He is hotter than ever than he had been at any time since his glory days in the 1980s.
But the funny story is – he has achieved his career goal of having a hit movie only after his death.
For the past year, I personally think that what happened is that people focused on Jackson’s music for the first time in many, many years. They just remembered how much they loved him and how much he is worth of their attention.
Amidst the controversies that he had been involved with, people was able to look past all of these –large and small, troubling and trivial–that turned a lot of people off.
Since his death, Jackson has sold over 9 million albums in the U.S. alone that enabled him to vault from #47 to #18 on SoundScan’s running list of the top 200 album sellers of music history.
This feat is perhaps one of the biggest and most impressive in the history of music. Although, at the death of Elvis Presley, Soundscan was not yet around, Billboard has shed some light on this matter.
With his smash compilation Number Ones, Jackson became only the 13th artist to have the best-selling album in the U.S. posthumously. And with the subsequent soundtrack to Michael Jackson’s This Is It, he became one of only five artists to have the best-selling album in the U.S. with two albums after his death. Bandleader Glenn Miller and rappers 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. each had three posthumous #1 albums. Nirvana, featuring the late Kurt Cobain, had two.
Truly, he is a music icon that all people would love.