More than 40 years later, Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ is still making Billboard history

The iconic album jumped to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 as a new generation discovers the music that helped transform pop culture.

Every October, “Thriller” comes back from the dead. This year, it nearly made it all the way to the top.

Billboard reported that Michael Jackson’s landmark album jumped from No. 13 to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart dated Nov. 14. That marks its highest position since April 14, 1984, when it spent its 37th and final week at No. 1. That run still stands as the longest for an album by a single artist. Only the “West Side Story” film soundtrack has logged more weeks at the top, with 54 in 1962 and 1963.

The timing explains much of the climb. The tracking week ran from Oct. 30 through Nov. 5, capturing Halloween and the annual spike in plays of the title track. “Thriller” earned 55,000 equivalent album units, an 89% increase from the week before. Streaming equivalent albums accounted for 32,000 of those units, representing 34.34 million on-demand streams of the album’s songs.

Physical sales did the rest. The album was reissued on Oct. 30 in three new vinyl editions, two in color and one liquid-filled, plus a cassette. Sales jumped 335% to 22,000 copies, the album’s largest sales week in nearly four years. Vinyl made up 19,000 of those copies, the biggest vinyl week “Thriller” has recorded since Luminate began tracking sales electronically in 1991.

The result gives Jackson his highest Billboard 200 rank in more than a decade. The last time he climbed this high was in 2014, when the posthumous album “Xscape” debuted and peaked at No. 2.

The Halloween bump is the latest stage of an unusually long revival. “Thriller” has appeared on the chart every year since Jackson’s death in June 2009. In 2026, it found a new audience through the record-setting biopic “Michael.” The album has stayed inside the top 20 every week since early May and held a top 10 spot for 15 straight weeks through August.

That staying power says something about the record’s place in Black music history. “Thriller” broke down racial barriers on MTV and in mainstream pop, and four decades later, it still moves units at a pace most new releases cannot match. Listeners who first heard it on vinyl in 1982 are now buying it again on vinyl, alongside a generation discovering it through a film and a holiday playlist.

Only Olivia Rodrigo’s “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love,” which notched its fourth week at No. 1, kept Jackson from the top spot.