HISTORY’s Moment in Media: Thriller Debuts and Shakes Up the Music Industry

In 1982, Jackson was 24 years old, and he’d already been famous for nearly two decades. Performing funk-infused bubblegum pop with his four brothers as the Jackson 5, he had his first No. 1 hit at age 11, with “I Want You Back.” He released his first solo album, Got to Be There, in 1971, at age 13, while also still performing with his brothers. His first solo No. 1 hit came the next year, with the title track from his sophomore album, “Ben”.

But Jackson’s big solo breakthrough was in 1979, once he started working with the legendary producer Quincy Jones (who passed away earlier this month after a storied career). For the Off the Wallalbum, Jones helped Jackson find a more sophisticated pop-funk sound, and it delivered grown-up success. It was the first album by a solo artist to deliver four Top 10 hits. It won Jackson the Best Male R&B Vocal Grammy Award. The BBC called it “one of the finest pop albums ever made.”

When Jackson and Jones got to work on their next effort, their ambitions were high. But in 1982, the music business was in a tough period. The United States was in a deep recession. The transition from AM radio to FM had essentially killed off the mass-audience Top 40 broadcasters, with tastes splintering to more targeted stations. Disco was dead, but nothing had taken its place. MTV was just getting started. Even worse, CBS Records, home to Jackson’s label, Epic, was in free fall. Industry-wide, record sales had dropped by 50 million units between 1980 and 1982. Profits at CBS were down 50 percent and that summer, the record company imposed mass layoffs.

Jackson knew he wanted to do something different. Most albums, he said, had “one good song, but the rest were like B-sides.” He wanted an album on which “every song was a killer.” Together with Jones, he sorted through hundreds and hundreds of demo tracks to select the nine songs that would appear on the album. Jackson himself wrote four of them. The others were by the songwriter Rod Temperton, once a keyboardist for the band Heatwave.

Production started in December 1981, when Jackson and Jones spent three days in Tucson, Arizona, recording the duet “The Girl Is Mine.” Things really got cranking in the summer of 1982. Jones was a perfectionist, and each track was recorded and rerecorded. Eventually, Jackson and Jones painstakingly remixed each song to achieve the exact sound they were looking for, and then remixed them all again. Their priority for the album was to balance a range of different styles: R&B, pop, disco, funk, rock. The recording budget was $750,000, close to $2 million today. They wanted everything to sound perfect.

As the two kept tinkering, Epic was forced to delay the release date. But once label executives heard the album, they knew they had a megahit. Because the music industry was so segmented then, singles by Black artists typically debuted on R&B stations, only crossing over to mainstream radio if they became big successes. But Jackson, Jones, and Epic marketers were smart: By making the McCartney duet “The Girl Is Mine” the first single, in early November, they guaranteed airplay across the radio dial -- and the song quickly debuted on the Billboard Hot 100. The album came out a few weeks later and debuted on the charts at No. 11. It was also the first time in history an album was released simultaneously all around the world.

“Billie Jean” was the album’s second single -- eventually, Thriller would produce an unprecedented seven singles -- and the radio stations picked it up immediately. Confident they could get it onto MTV, too, music executives invested in an expensive and lavish video, plus another for the third single, “Beat It” (which, echoing the McCartney strategy, included an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo). Till that point, MTV was known for playing almost exclusively videos by white artists, but in part that’s because the music network had debuted during a time of a segregated music landscape. Its early audience was mostly white teens in suburbs -- MTV arrived in New York City and Los Angeles only in September 1982. Jackson’s videos became staples of the young station, boosting MTV as much as MTV boosted Jackson.

Things kept going right. The next spring, Jackson appeared on the MTV 25th Anniversary special on NBC -- marking the national TV premiere for the moonwalk. Some 47 million Americans tuned in, including many who didn’t have cable, and Jackson outshone all the legendary Motown stars. And then in December of 1983 -- more than a year after the album’s debut -- the 14-minute “Thriller” video was released, directed by filmmaker John Landis. There’d never been a music video like it before, and it launched Jackson to even more fame. The behind-the-scenes making-of documentary, another first, became a nationwide hit, too.

By then, Jackson was the undisputed King of Pop. At the Grammy Awards a few months later, Thriller won eight trophies. Perhaps more important, it revived the industry. Mass-audience Top 40 radio came back. Major, global releases for major albums became the norm. Music by Black artists became a staple of MTV.

Jackson would go on to lead a complicated, troubled life until in 2009, he died of a drug overdose, only 50 years old. His music, though, lives on. In addition to its record-breaking physical sales, Thriller has reportedly been streamed more than 5 billion times on Spotify, a service founded more than two decades after the album’s release.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

Click the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friends.
The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.