Death Becomes Him (Michael Jackon Is #1 Again)

I visited Billboard's website early this morning and among the many news surrounding Michael Jackson's death is one chart-busting headline: Michael Jackson breaks several records.

The King of Pop once again proved that he RULES the music charts.

As expected, his death led to an upsurge in sales of his catalog albums and songs. Here are the highlights:



• The entire Top 9 positions on Billboard’s Pop Catalog Chart (for sales of old albums) are MJ-related titles. At #1 is of course... Number Ones which sold 108,000 copies after his death. A week before his death, this was the only MJ album on this chart (at #20).

• Number Ones sold more than the current #1 album on the Billboard Hot 200. Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D shifted 88,000 copies. This is the first time that a catalog album outsold a current album.

• The said nine albums sold an amazing total of 422,000 copies this past week (more than half from digital downloads). A week before, MJ was only selling 10,000 copies of his old albums.

• And now for the song charts, Michael Jackson placed a record-breaking 25 songs on the Top 75 Digital Song tally; breaking David Cook’s post-Idol record last year of 14 charting titles.

• The song Thriller moved 167,000 copies last week, second only to Black Eyed Peas’ current hit I Gotta Feeling which sold 203,000 downloads. The week before, Thriller sold only 5,000 downloads.

• Six of the Top 10 songs are Michael Jackson's past hits.

• Combined, he sold 2.6 million downloads of his songs this week. This makes him the first artist in history to sell more than 1 million downloads in one week.

I just hope that the royalties from these downloads will add to the coffer of this financially-challenged music icon of our generation.