How the ‘Michael’ Movie Helped Boost This Song to Break New Records
Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ has crossed 3 billion streams on Spotify, landing a milestone that makes history in multiple directions simultaneously. As flagged by Akhil Jackson, the 1983 classic is now the first song from the 20th century released by a solo artist to hit the mark, placing it alongside only “Every Breath You Take” by The Police and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen as the third 20th century song of any kind to have ever reached that threshold on the platform.
The achievement is the latest chapter in what has become one of the most statistically improbable streaming surges in recorded music history. Jackson’s catalog had already been experiencing elevated activity before the biopic’s release, but ‘Billie Jean’ in particular exploded after ‘Michael’ hit theaters in April, climbing from under 2 billion streams at the time and adding volume at a pace that consistently outpaced the platform’s biggest contemporary releases.
The scale of the streaming uplift across the full catalog has been extraordinary. According to data from Chartmetric, Jackson had approximately 68 million monthly listeners on Spotify just before the biopic opened, a number that climbed to 73 million in the first week alone and has since stabilized above 100 million, with Music Business Worldwide reporting the figure standing at 108 million monthly listeners at last count.
‘Billie Jean’ reached its highest-ever single-day stream count on May 15, recording 6.028 million plays and briefly holding the number one position on Spotify’s Daily Global chart.
The chart climb of ‘Billie Jean’ during the biopic period was itself record-setting in a different way. According to industry data, the song reached number one on the Billboard Global 200 in May, its first time ever atop that chart, arriving in its 144th week on the list and setting the record for the longest-ever climb to the top position in that chart’s history.
None of this happened without a financial foundation that made the streaming surge consequential beyond the optics. Sony Music holds a 50% stake in Jackson’s publishing and recorded-masters catalog through a deal cleared in August 2024, in a transaction valued at up to $1.5 billion, meaning the catalog uplift driven by the biopic feeds directly into Sony’s own revenue stream and makes every streaming record a commercially meaningful data point, not merely a fan milestone.
With the biopic now the highest-grossing biographical film ever made and closing in on a billion dollars globally, the music continues to operate at a level that should not be statistically possible for recordings that are more than four decades old. The 3 billion streams benchmark for ‘Billie Jean’ is not the end of that story. It is simply the latest signpost on what has become one of the most unusual cultural resurgences the music industry has ever had to measure.
Have something to add? Let us know in the comments!
