Michael Jackson: A 37% Royalty, Breaking MTV and the Day Google Stalled

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On June 25, 2009, search traffic for Michael Jackson spiked so sharply that Google's systems treated it as a possible attack, Twitter crashed and Wikipedia slowed. The episode traces that level of fame back to Gary, Indiana, where his father Joe Jackson, a former boxer and steel mill crane operator, ran rehearsals with a belt in hand and sent his sons around the Chitlin' Circuit, including cocktail lounges with striptease acts. The brothers scored four straight No. 1 hits at Motown before Michael was a teenager.

The Jacksons left Motown for Epic in 1975 to gain creative control, and Michael met Quincy Jones on the 1978 film The Wiz. He secured a 37% wholesale royalty rate, released Thriller in 1982 and forced a reluctant MTV to play his videos, which he turned into film-scale productions with directors like John Landis. Later decades brought changes in his appearance, abuse allegations that ended in a 1993 settlement and a 2005 acquittal, heavy debt, the This Is It residency at the O2 Arena and his death from a propofol overdose given by Dr. Conrad Murray.

Thriller sold an estimated 70 million copies, the best-selling album in history.
He learned the moonwalk from Jeffrey Daniel and debuted it on a 1983 television special.
He signed a record $5 million endorsement deal with Pepsi.
He left the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1987 after backlash over the imagery in his videos.
His charitable giving is estimated at $500 million, and a 2026 biopic became the highest-grossing biographical film.

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