Michael Jackson made his most famous videos on film, decades before broadband, smartphones, or streaming existed. “Billie Jean” came out in 1983. “Thriller” came out the same year. “Smooth Criminal” came out in 1988.
And in October 2024, when “Smooth Criminal” quietly crossed one billion views on YouTube, it completed something no other artist from the twentieth century has managed.
Five music videos, each past a billion views.
The full list: “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Thriller,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” and “Smooth Criminal.” All five now sit in YouTube’s Billions Club, and the numbers keep climbing — “Billie Jean” alone has passed two billion.
Michael Jackson – Billie Jean (Official Video)
Sit with what that actually means. These are not new songs pushed by playlists and algorithms. They are films made for MTV, shot on physical film stock, by a man who died in 2009—being watched right now by people who were not born when he made them.
And each one earned its place differently.
“Thriller” is not really a music video at all. It is a fourteen-minute horror short film with a full narrative, a werewolf transformation, and Vincent Price narrating. In 2009, it became the first music video ever preserved in the United States National Film Registry, alongside Citizen Kane.
“Billie Jean” broke MTV’s color barrier at a time when the channel had almost no Black artists in rotation.
Michael Jackson – Smooth Criminal (Official Video)
“Smooth Criminal” is the anti-gravity lean — a move so impossible that Jackson patented the shoe mechanism that made it work on stage.
And “They Don’t Care About Us” is the Brazil version, filmed in a Rio favela while the state government tried to stop him.
Forty years on, in a format he never lived to see. Nobody else from his century is close.