Michael Jackson hasn’t put out new music in a very long time. He passed away back in 2009. And yet in 2026 he went and did something almost no artist, living or gone, ever manages to pull off. He climbed back to number one in the world.
In May 2026, Michael topped the global digital artist ranking, which measures who is actually being streamed, bought and played across platforms everywhere. He finished the month at number one in the world, ahead of every current pop star out there with brand new music to push.
So what lit the fuse? The biopic.
First look at the Michael biopic
The film Michael, with his nephew Jaafar in the lead, sent a whole new generation straight back to his catalog. And as the movie pulled people in, they didn’t just watch it. They went digging. Suddenly Thriller was climbing back into the Billboard top ten. Number Ones re-entered the charts. Billie Jean and the rest came roaring back, decades after they first ruled the radio.
Sit with how strange and wonderful that really is. A whole crop of today’s biggest stars, with the newest songs and the slickest rollouts money can buy, and the artist the world kept reaching for was a man who left us seventeen years ago.
The final trailer for the Michael biopic
Watch the trailer and it’s easy to understand why. Seeing him move and sing again, even through his nephew, hit people a lot harder than anyone expected it to. It sent them back to the source, to the real thing, in their millions.
They say legends never really die. Michael keeps proving it in the most literal way there is. Almost two decades gone, and out of nowhere he can still become the most listened-to artist alive. Or not alive. With him, that line never quite held anyway.