Some records get broken. Some get chipped away at slowly. And a few sit there, decade after decade, with nobody getting close. Michael Jackson has a fistful of the third kind.
Here are the numbers that still stop people, more than fifteen years after he died — and every one of them is verified rather than fan folklore.
Start with the obvious one. Thriller is, according to Guinness World Records, the best-selling album of all time. Estimates vary because global sales figures always do, but Guinness puts it at over 67 million copies, and other counts run past 100 million. In America alone, it became the first album in history to be certified 30 times platinum by the RIAA. It also spent 37 weeks at number one on the Billboard album chart, the longest run ever managed by a studio album. And it produced seven US Top 10 singles from a single record.
Then there is the night that has never been beaten. At the 1984 Grammy Awards, Jackson walked in with 12 nominations — a record in itself — and walked out with eight awards.
Seven were for Thriller, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for “Beat It.” The eighth was for something completely different: narrating a children’s storybook album of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The previous record had been seven, set by Paul Simon in 1970. Jackson’s eight-in-one night has been tied but never beaten. And he said afterward that of everything he won, the one he was proudest of was the E.T. award.
Now the one almost nobody knows, and it might be the most impressive of all. Jackson has scored Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 across six consecutive decades. It started with the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” in 1969 and has continued through posthumous chart entries decades later. Guinness certified him for the longest span of US Top 40 singles in history — a span now stretching beyond fifty years. Very few artists manage two decades. He managed six.
Michael Jackson’s 10 Most INSANE World Records You Never Knew
A few more that stand out. Guinness recognizes him as the most successful entertainer of all time. He is the most decorated recording artist in popular music history, with a total of 834 awards, including 13 Grammys and 26 American Music Awards. He is the only artist with five solo albums that have sold over 20 million copies each. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice — once with the Jackson 5 and once alone.
And live, the numbers are just as absurd. During the Bad tour in the summer of 1988, he sold out Wembley Stadium in London seven times, playing to 504,000 people across those nights — which took the Guinness record for the most successful concert series.
One last one, because it puts everything else in perspective. Guinness recognizes the “Thriller” short film as the most successful music video ever made. In 2009, it became the first music video ever selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress — the same archive that preserves Citizen Kane—a fourteen-minute clip about zombies, filed alongside the most important films in American history.