Michael Jackson died on 25 June 2009. Seventeen years later, he is not a legacy act quietly ticking over. He is actively setting records that didn’t exist while he was alive — competing on the charts against artists born after Thriller came out.
The biggest one arrived when “Thriller” climbed back into the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. That single chart move made Jackson the first artist in history to score Top 10 hits in six different decades — the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s.
Andy Williams held the record, managing five decades with his Christmas song. Jackson beat it with a Halloween song that comes back every October, the same way Williams’s came back every December.
Michael Jackson – Thriller (Official 4K Video)
Think about where that streak starts. He first hit the Top 10 in 1970, aged 11, singing lead on the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” He was in fifth grade. Six decades later, the same man is still doing it.
Then came the biopic. Michael was released in April 2026 and has since passed a billion dollars, making it the highest-grossing music biopic ever made. And it sent a whole new audience straight to his catalog.
How The MICHAEL Movie Is Breaking Records Worldwide
In the last week of April 2026, his solo music pulled 137.5 million streams in the United States alone — a personal record, shattering his previous best. Across his top songs, monthly streaming leaped from roughly 467 million plays to over 1.2 billion. He also became the first artist this decade to reach number one posthumously on the Billboard Artist 100.
And the older records still stand. Thriller remains, per Guinness World Records, the best-selling album of all time. In 2009, its video became the first music video ever preserved in the US National Film Registry, alongside Citizen Kane.
He has been gone since 2009. The charts have not noticed.