Why Listeners Still Listen to Michael Jackson

By June 26, 2009, the day after he died, listeners had decided they liked Michael Jackson’s music again.

I had been working in music research for more than five years, and had become used to gradual shifts in audience taste. Listeners aged in and out of the target demo for AC, Adult R&B, and Classic Hits and songs accompanied them. Songs that hadn’t done well for a while, or were newly eligible, first came back playable at a station or two, then were in the consideration set for everybody. The passing of a major artist might help revive a song or two in their catalog.

The return of Michael Jackson’s music to the radio was more of a light-switch moment. For much of the ’00s, radio hadn’t played or even tested the artist’s hits. Jackson was acquitted in 2005 on multiple charges; by then, that seemed beside the point in terms of listeners’ ability to enjoy the music on its own merits. Around 2008 or so, a few Adult R&B stations began testing Jackson’s hits. When a few, not all, were playable, that was a statement in itself.

But on the weekend of his death, playing Jackson’s music was an event in New York radio that helped propel WKTU back into prominence. A few months later, it became common to see 6-12 Jackson titles on the front page of an AC, Classic Hits, or Adult R&B music test and a bunch clustered near the top, almost interchangeably. When the Throwback Hip-Hop/R&B format sprouted up, early stations such as WBQT (Hot 96.9) Boston went back a decade further for Jackson’s hits than for anything else.

When Leaving Neverland premiered on HBO in 2019, resurfacing some of the accusations against Jackson, the industry wondered how listeners and stations would respond. The Classic Hits stations I worked with girded for a massive backlash but got a relative handful of calls. Individually, there were certainly people who stopped listening again in 2019 or never came back in 2009. For many, though, it was a different story.

In that next round of music tests, Jackson’s music wasn’t quite as dominant, but there wasn’t an across-the-board rejection, either. In some markets, listeners seemed to vote no on certain songs — “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” was uncomfortably ironic for some PDs; “Man in the Mirror” felt like life-coaching that some listeners no longer wanted from him. But the consistent pattern was that the body of hits held fast in market after market.

In 2021, the musical MJ opened and continues to run successfully on Broadway. Three weeks ago, the film Michael had the highest-grossing opening weekend of any biopic. At this writing, it is nearing $600 million in worldwide earnings. Critics took issue with the film’s pre-scandal timeline; Facebook friends have tended to accept the movie on its own terms and praised Jaafar Jackson’s performance.

Last week, Billboard reported that Jackson’s on-demand streams were up 146% and more than double his career high. This week, they were up another 32% to 181.6 million. There are two Jackson compilations in the top six of the Billboard 200. “Billie Jean” was the No. 8 request on the syndicated Hot AC/CHR show Liveline, and host Mason Kelter suggests that contemporary stations should be doing more to acknowledge the resurgence of Jackson’s music.

In the events of 2009, 2019, and 2026, there is a larger story about how the audience responds to artists and their music. This article is likely being read by both listeners who never came back to Jackson’s music and those who never left it; they may object to a generational artist and his body of work being asterisked at all. Whatever your personal feelings, when you look at the audience as a whole, however, there is a story worth telling, as well as implications for music now. From a two-decade timeline, these are some takeaways:

Most listeners have been comfortable keeping with a decision they made in 2009. Music tests tell you what listeners like, not why. Was liking Jackson’s music different because he was no longer among us? Did hearing the music again in 2009 remind people how much they loved the songs to begin with? Whatever the prompt in 2009, most listeners didn’t change their minds in 2019. For them, if not for every reader, it’s not an issue now when it comes to the music.

Readers say they are comfortable separating an artist from their art. When I posed the question on Facebook, friends and readers said they were comfortable with that decision by a 5:1 margin over those who said they could not separate the two. I asked the question about “artists,” not specifically musicians, or any particular musician, and offered that nobody would be directly quoted so that readers could speak freely. 

Why are listeners more willing to make that distinction now than they were in 2008? One recurring rationale was that we know more and have personal reservations about more artists now. A few did indeed say that it came down to whether an artist was still alive and a career was still being supported.

Among those who weren’t willing to separate artists from their music were several who, again speaking generally, felt that art was inherently a personal statement.  “The emotion [of] the music is tainted by the creator’s actions,” wrote one. “Being an artist is a privilege,” wrote one programmer, in explaining why he chose to move on from certain acts. 

The second-largest group of readers were those who made their decision on an artist-by-artist basis.  Some FB friends allowed that it was hard to be consistent about who they still enjoy hearing. While the question was asked about all artists, a few volunteered that they still listened to Jackson, but never without thinking about his attendant controversies. 

I heard from readers who were able to make a distinction for musicians, but not actors. There were readers who were more likely to be mad at artists over their politics; there were readers who were willing to set aside politics, but not personal actions. In general, however, many readers and listeners have learned to compartmentalize. Here’s one possible reason.

If you do enjoy Jackson’s music, it offers a shared experience that listeners clearly miss. Over the course of 15 months, Thriller was actually multiple shared experiences from Motown 25 to the “Thriller” video, then followed by a slew of Jackson-related releases and the Victory tour. Even now, and even among those who weren’t born in 1983, “Billie Jean” is more of a shared experience than almost all recent hits.

Because radio was a shared experience in 1983, Thriller was also a moment of radio flex. Radio found “Billie Jean” almost immediately while “The Girl Is Mine” was still the single. (I still remember hearing “Billie Jean” on WXYV (V103) Baltimore for the first time within minutes of Thriller’s release.) That MTV was forced to play “Billie Jean” was in part because Top 40 had been forced to acknowledge “Billie Jean” (and “Sexual Healing,” “Little Red Corvette,” and “Electric Avenue”) after three years of “disco backlash” and because Rock radio was forced to play “Beat It.” 

At a time when singles were still the unit of currency, radio generally ran one song ahead of the label on Thriller, spurring most of Epic’s singles choices but still managing to extend the project’s lifespan to 15 months. Now, it’s easy to imagine a flurry of first-week streaming from which a few songs would emerge as hits, but others would be lost.

Listeners miss uptempo R&B, too. If Classic Hits had lost Jackson in 2019, it would have had the reverse effect of “Billie Jean” on MTV in 1983, leaving only Prince, Whitney Houston, and one Tina Turner song among the top 100 of a format that increasingly sounds more like CHR did in 1981 than 1983. Janet Jackson chose not to be part of Michael, but I hope the format will notice that her streams are up sharply as well.

There’s an even more glaring lack of uptempo R&B hits in CHR’s top 15 as well, in part because there’s not much available to cross over from Hip-Hop/R&B or Rhythmic CHR either. For CHR to acknowledge the excitement about Michael doesn’t just mean playing “Billie Jean,” it means being on the lookout for some songs that meet the same sonic need, but aren’t 43 years old.