How Quincy Jones Helped Michael Jackson Craft the Smash ‘Thriller’ — and How the Epic Music Video Almost Didn’t Happen

It’s impossible to name the definitive work of Quincy Jones, the multi-disciplinary maestro who died on Nov. 3 after helping shape nearly every artistic medium for more than 60 years. But one that first leaps to mind is likely “Thriller,” Michael Jackson’s spooky funk-pop smash that served as the title track to the most commercially successful album in history. Like Jones himself, who produced the record, the perennial Halloween anthem was a multi-media affair, encompassing music, film, television, dance and fashion.

More than 40 years since its release in 1982, “Thriller” represents an apex of artistic collaboration by a creative team at the peak of their powers. Moreover, it continues to fill dance floors across the globe.

Read on to learn more about the all-time music classic, and for more behind-the-scenes stories and little-known details about “Thriller,“ check out the recent episode of the iHeartRadio podcast Too Much Information, hosted by former PEOPLE editors Jordan Runtagh and Alex Heigl.

1. From the start, the album was designed to be a crossover smash

Michael Jackson first rose to fame in the early ‘70s as the pint-sized frontman of Motown’s Jackson 5. But Jackson became a bonafide superstar with his first solo album for Epic Records, Off the Wall, for which he enlisted Quincy Jones as producer. Upon the record’s release in 1979, Epic made the then-unusual move of promoting it simultaneously to pop and R&B markets, which helped Off the Wall become an enormous crossover success.

After that, Jackson and Jones aimed to go bigger. “The impetus was to have every song be a hit,” Larry Williams, who played saxophone, flute and synths on the album, told The New York Post in 2022. “That was the mandate.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2009, Jones admitted that creating a record with this goal required far more than just the two of them. “Michael didn’t create Thriller. It takes a team to make an album. He wrote four songs, and he sang his ass off, but he didn’t conceive it – that’s not how an album works.”

2. ‘Thriller’ was written by Rod Temperton, the man behind Jackson’s solo breakthrough — and a disco classic

The secret MVP of the entire Thriller project is Rod Temperton — who is such a relentlessly low-key guy that both a biography and a BBC documentary about his career were titled The Invisible Man. A musical kid growing up in Lincolnshire, England, Temperton eventually joined a multiracial disco-funk band called Heatwave on keyboards and started contributing originals. His biggest hits for the band, “Boogie Nights” and the ballad “Always and Forever,” were both million-sellers and helped break the band in America, which is how he came to the attention of Quincy Jones.

Temperton left Heatwave in 1978 with the intention of focusing on his writing. “It was not a career decision in the sense of I knew what I was going to do,” he later told the BBC. “I had no idea where I was going … If I was any good, somebody will call me, I guess.” That somebody ended up being Jones. Impressed by the Heatwave hits, Jones called Temperton in 1978 and liked his demos enough to fly him to L.A. on weekends to work on Off the Wall. The initial plan was for Temperton to contribute just one song to the album, but Jackson recorded all three that he offered: “Burn This Disco Out,” “Rock With You” and the title track — “Off the Wall.”

When working on Thriller, 24-year-old Jackson wrote only four of the tracks himself: “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'”, “The Girl Is Mine”, “Beat It” and “Billie Jean.” The others were selected by Jones and Temperton. In his 2001 autobiography, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, Jones claimed that he and Temperton “listened to nearly 600 songs before picking out a dozen we liked.” Jones would put that figure at 800 in other interviews, but he’s consistently said that around 30 of these were written by Temperton.

3. ‘Thriller’ was inspired by Jackson’s love of movies 

As they grew acquainted, Temperton quickly honed in on Jackson’s love of movies, which ultimately inspired the title track. “I came up with the idea that I should write something really theatrical,” he told M Magazine in 2012. “I’d been really impressed with Michael’s participation in the rhythm section when recording [the Off the Wall song] ‘Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,’ so I wanted to write something with the same power, but a really dramatic melody structure.” 

Jackson’s passion for film didn’t extend to the horror genre, however. He described himself as “too scared” for anything fright-inducing. This probably was the result of paternal trauma. Years earlier, Jackson claimed, his father Joe tried to teach him a lesson about leaving his bedroom windows open by climbing in one night wearing a mask and shouting at Jackson. The approach worked too well, and the boy endured recurring nightmares about being kidnapped.

4. An early version of the song was called ‘Starlight’

Temperton recorded the demo for what would become “Thriller” on a two-track Revox tape machine in his cluttered German apartment. (“He had piles of washing, and had the TV on top of the organ,” a friend recalled to the BBC. “It was a nightmare … he had trams running outside.”) He started with the music, constructing a chord sequence that gradually increased in intensity — like the plot of a good movie. “I remember messing around with bass patterns and drums until I came up with the core bass line that runs through the piece,” he continued to M. “Then I started building chords on top to grow the tune to its climax. I wanted it to build and build — a bit like stretching an elastic band throughout the tune to heighten suspense.”

The song’s lyrics and title went through a few iterations. “Originally, when I did my ‘Thriller’ demo, I called it ‘Starlight,’ ” Temperton told The Telegraph. “Quincy said to me, ‘You managed to come up with a title for the last album, see what you can do for this album.’ I said, ‘Oh great,’ so I went back to the hotel, wrote two or three hundred titles, and came up with the title Midnight Man. The next morning, I woke up, and I just said this word … Something in my head just said, this is the title. You could visualize it on the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as Thriller.”

5. The opening chord was inspired by Quincy Jones’ love for a young Prince

Filling out the ranks of the “Thriller” personnel is a group of known Quincy Jones collaborators: Greg Phillinganes on synths and Fender Rhodes, David Williams on guitar, with Jerry Hey, Gary Grant, Larry Williams and Bill Reichenbach on various horns. Brian Banks, who also played synths, pegged one interesting source of inspiration for the song’s arrangement.

“It was late in the evening one night when we were working, and Quincy came to us,” he recalled to The Telegraph. “He wanted this huge chord sequence — he said, ‘There’s this sound that I’ve got in my head, there’s this underground, this new artist, that nobody’s ever really heard of but he’s great, he’s hot, he’s got this great song.’ And he pulled out the album and it was Prince, 1999. And you know the opening sound on that? Duh-da da, Dur-duh-duh? Well that was the sound — that big, bitey chord sound at the opening of ‘1999’ — he wanted that, but bigger, for ‘Thriller.’ ” 

So began one of the fiercest musical rivalries of the ‘80s, as Prince and Jackson spent the remainder of the decade duking it out in the studio and in the charts.

6. Jackson did most of the wolf howls himself

The album came together in a scant two months – at a cost. Recorded at Westlake Recording Studios in LA, its budget was $750,000 — which is nearly $2.4 million in 2025 dollars. The entire production team worked around the clock. “They would carry the second engineers out on stretchers,” Jones said — with a touch of hyperbole — in an interview with the BBC. “And the musicians too. Bruce and I … would stay up for 5 days, 5 nights. The passion drives you.”

Talking to MusicRadar, engineer Bruce Swedien explained that the wolf howls on “Thriller” were Rod Termperton’s idea. “At the time there was a Sherlock Holmes movie, The Hound of The Baskervilles, that had this huge dog — a Great Dane — in it that did some howling. Of course, I had that in my mind’s ear. I automatically thought of my Great Dane who I figured ought to be in show business! So I tried to get him to do those howls and you know what? He never did it. We put him up in the barn at night to listen to the coyotes and I had my tape machine ready to record him. He was a fantastic dog, 200 pounds, his name was Max …  But you know who it is that is doing those wolf howls? That’s Michael Jackson. We had to get Michael to do it instead, but he did it so great. There’s some library stuff in there but Michael did those wolf howls.” 

The sounds of the creaking doors required a surprising amount of trial and error for Swedien. “I went to Universal Studios in Hollywood, the movie lot, and rented two or three sound effects doors and brought them to Westlake and spent a whole day auditioning these doors and miked the hinges real close,” he continued. “That is a real door and I recorded that and added it on the track. Come to think of it, that might have been Michael doing those footsteps too, actually.”

7. Jackson recorded his vocals in the dark

When recording the follow-up to Thiller, 1987’s Bad,  Jackson recorded his vocals on the drum riser surrounded by acoustic reflectors so the sound of his dancing as he sang could be captured on the mic. Things were a little more lo-tech during the Thriller dates, but Jackson added to the spooky vibe of the title track by insisting that he record his vocals in the dark.

“He hated light,” Swedien told Music Radar. “I mean I would have a little bit of light for him, but the studio was absolutely dark. I think one reason why he wanted this — and why it works so effectively — is that through my study of acoustics and so on, I found that the human being is primarily a visual animal, hearing is our second sense. People can be distracted by too much light in the studio to the extent that it can take away from the music.”

8. Quincy Jones’ then-wife Peggy Lipton contacted Vincent Price — who regretted his involvement for the rest of his life

“I had always envisioned a talking section at the end,” Temperton said in an interview included on the CD reissue of Thriller, “but I didn’t really know what to do with it.” Originally he considered hiring Elvira, Mistress of the Dark to do the voiceover at the closeout of “Thriller,” but her image was likely a little too overtly sexual for Jackson. The solution came when Jones’ wife Peggy Lipton — at the time best known as Julie from The Mod Squad but later beloved as Norma from Twin Peaks — revealed she knew the legendary horror movie actor Vincent Price.

“The idea was that [Price] would just talk some horror talk like he would deliver in his famous roles,” Temperton later said. “The night before the session, Quincy called and said, ‘I’m a bit scared. Perhaps you better write something for him.’ ” Temperton wrote one verse of the rap that closes the song while waiting for a taxi to the studio, and then two more verses during the ride. “Rod wrote this brilliant Edgar Allan Poe spiel,” said Jones. “And Vincent really understood it … Vincent did it in two takes.”

Price was given the choice of a flat fee for his work on the track or a cut of the profits. Unfortunately for him, he chose a flat fee. This rankled Price after the song became a record-breaking hit. John Landis, who directed the “Thriller” video, told The Telegraph, “Vincent called me about a year later and he said, ‘Look, the kid made the most successful record of all time and I made less than $1,000 … Michael won’t take my calls … I’m very upset about it.'”

Price’s daughter Victoria elaborated on the feud in a 2018 biography she wrote about her father. “Word eventually trickled back to Michael Jackson that my father was upset about the money. One day I answered the door at my father’s house to find three members of Jackson’s entourage. They came bearing a gift — a letter of thanks from Jackson and a large frame containing a poster of the pop star and one gold and two platinum albums, all dedicated to Vincent.” 

This didn’t mollify Price. He attempted to get paid for the usage of his voice in the music video, but there was a clause about video usage buried in his original contract, so he didn’t get any further money from that, either. At that point, Victoria wrote, “Vincent agitated to have the gold disc auctioned, with the proceeds to go to his gallery at East Los Angeles College.”

9. ‘Thriller’ wasn’t originally going to have a video, until Jackson got competitive with Madonna and Prince

Despite the heavy marketing push behind Thriller, the brain trust behind that push — Jackson; his lawyer and closest adviser, John Branca; CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff; and Epic head of promotion Frank DiLeo — did not include plans for a video of the title track, which wasn’t even going to be released as a single. “Who wants a single about monsters?” Yetnikoff told Vanity Fair. This was despite the fact that Jackson’s clips for “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” had become instant classics on a nascent MTV. (Part of the success of those videos was due to Yetnikoff threatening to pull all CBS/Columbia acts from MTV’s rotation unless they played Jackson — striking a crucial blow to MTV’s alleged ban on Black acts. MTV denied that the network ever ‘refused to air’ Black artists.)

Another factor in the “Thriller” video’s conception was that the album was bumped from the top slot in June 1983 by the Flashdance soundtrack. Thriller briefly crawled back atop the charts in July before being bumped again by The Police’s Synchronicity. For the extremely competitive Jackson, obsessed with beating both his peers like Prince and Madonna as well as the Beatles, this was cause for alarm and Yetnikoff started getting calls in the middle of the night from Jackson. “Walter, the record isn’t No. 1 anymore,” Yetnikoff recalled Jackson saying. “What are we going to do about it?” Yetnikoff’s reply? “We’re going to go to sleep and deal with it tomorrow.”

It was DiLeo who first mentioned the idea of making a third video, and ultimately pressed Jackson to consider the album’s title track.

10. John Landis didn’t want to direct the ‘Thriller’ music video at first

Despite not really being a horror aficionado, Jackson had seen An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’ groundbreaking horror comedy that featured Oscar-winning makeup from SFX icon Rick Baker. “[Michael] contacted me and asked me if I would make a video with him,” Landis told The Telegraph. “And I said ‘No,’ actually — because they were basically commercials, right? But he persisted and said, ‘No, no, no — I really wanna make it.’ So when I returned to L.A. I called Rick Baker, who had done the makeup effects for American Werewolf and said, ‘Rick, Michael Jackson wants to become a monster.’ ”

11. Jackson ended up footing most of the bill for the ‘Thriller’ video himself

Landis told Jackson that he didn’t want to direct a music video and instead wanted to think of the production as an actual short film, shot on 35 mm., with multiple locations, a show-stopping dance number and Baker’s makeup — to the tune of $900,000, or nearly $2.9 million in 2025 money. Landis recalled that when Jackson called CBS head Walter Yetnikoff with that figure, after CBS had dropped $250,000 for “Beat It,” Yetnikoff screamed so loudly that the director had to hold the phone away from his ear. “I’ve only heard three or four people swear like that in my life,” he later told Vanity Fair. When Landis hung up the phone, Jackson said calmly, “It’s okay, I’ll pay for it.” 

CBS ultimately put another $100,000 toward the video, which still left a huge budget shortfall. So they contrived a unique solution: They decided to film behind the scenes on 16-mm. for a nearly 45-minute documentary, Making Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ which, bundled with the “Thriller” video, could be sold to cable. MTV agreed to pay $250,000 and Showtime $300,000 for the one-hour package; Jackson would cover assorted up-front costs and be reimbursed. Then Vestron came in and offered to distribute Making Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ as a $29.95 “sell-through” video on VHS and Betamax — a pioneering deal of its kind.

12. The makeup designer insists that Jackson is not a werewolf

SFX makeup designer Rick Baker had worked on King Kong, Star Wars and Landis’ An American Werewolf in London by the time he was approached to do Thriller — and he wasn’t all that thrilled at the prospect. “I got a call from John and he was like, ‘You know who Michael Jackson is?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, kinda. He’s the guy from the Jackson 5, right?’ ” he later told The Telegraph. “And he said, ‘Well he’s got this song called ‘Thriller’ and he wants to do this short film.’ At first I said I didn’t want to do it. It’s not the most popular job — it’s like being a dentist in a way: they have to sit still in a chair for hours while you work on them, it’s uncomfortable — it’s not something actors look forward to.”

Although most assume Jackson transitions into a werewolf, Baker maintains that this isn’t technically accurate. “We made him into more of a ‘werecat’ because I just didn’t want to do another werewolf,” he told Vulture in 2010. “At first I was thinking [it would be] almost like a black panther thing, but … I ended up putting a longer mane of hair on it and bigger ears.” The choice might have been one of necessity due to Jackson’s facial features — specifically his nose, which wouldn’t support more substantial prosthetics.

13. Jackson’s famous outfit was courtesy of Fred Astaire and John Landis’ wife

Jackson’s wardrobe was the work of Landis’ wife, Deborah. Since the video would be shot at night with a relatively subdued palette, she told Vanity Fair, “I felt that red would really pop in front of the ghouls,” and elected to make both his jacket and jeans red to make Jackson appear taller. (“The shoulders of that jacket gave him some virility,” she added to The Telegraph.) The socks and the shoes were his own, however. “He took that directly from Fred Astaire, who always wore soft leather loafers to dance in, and socks.” One of Jackson’s jackets was sold to a Texan gold trader named Milton Verret in 2011 for $1.8 million. 

14. Jackson helped develop the ‘Thriller’ dance steps himself with the help of a mirror

The iconic dancing in the video was a collaboration with “Beat It” choreographer Michael Peters. “It was a delicate thing to work on because I remember my original approach was, ‘How do you make zombies and monsters dance without it being comical?’ ” Jackson told MTV News in 1999. “So I said, ‘We have to do just the right kind of movement so it doesn’t become something that you laugh at.’ But it just has to take it to another level. So I got in a room with [choreographer] Michael Peters, and he and I together kind of imagined how these zombies move by making faces in the mirror. I used to come to rehearsal sometimes with monster makeup on, and I loved doing that. So he and I collaborated and we both choreographed the piece.” Michele Simmons, one of the dancers, told The Telegraph that the rehearsals were held in Debbie Reynolds’ dance studio in North Hollywood. 

In The Making of ‘Thriller feature, Peters talks about Jackson’s virtuosic ability, remarking that in “Thriller” he dances in front of 18 professionals who’ve spent their lives training to achieve what Jackson seems to pick up in minutes. “Purely on rhythm,” Peters says. “I give him a rhythm of a step and he does it … you say, ‘This is the beat, dum de dah, dah, dah,’ and he does it. It’s really wonderful to watch, because it’s an innate gift; he’s a dancer in his soul.”

15. Jackson had a real-life affair with his love interest in the ‘Thriller’ video — but it ended badly

For Landis’ I Was a Teenage Werewolf-inspired plot, they needed a love interest for Jackson. Ultimately they landed on Ola Ray, a former Playboy Playmate, which caused some consternation from Jackson. “I auditioned a lot of girls and this girl Ola Ray … first of all, she was crazy for Michael,” Landis told Vanity Fair. “She had such a great smile. I didn’t know she was a Playmate. I said, ‘Michael, she’s a Playmate, but so what? She’s not a Playmate in this.’ ”

Ray and Jackson ultimately got on extremely well, and even had a real-life romance on the set of the video. “I won’t say that I have seen him in his birthday suit but close enough,” she recalled to Vanity Fair. “Kissing and puppy-love make-out sessions and a little more than that.” Ray also appeared on Cheers and in Beverly Hills Cop II, but her only other notable music video was “Give Me the Night” by George Benson (a single also written by Rod Temperton and produced by Quincy Jones). Sadly, she and Jackson did not have a happy ending. She sued him in 2009 for nonpayment of royalties, saying, “I got the fame from ‘Thriller,’ but I didn’t get the fortune.”

16. Creators went to great lengths to keep the video shoot a secret

The cinema scenes for the “Thriller” video were shot at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles; the zombie sequence at the junction of Union Pacific Avenue and South Calzona Street in East Los Angeles; and the final house scene at 1345 Carroll Avenue in the Angeleno Heights neighborhood of Echo Park. Marty Thomas, the video’s props assistant, recalled the secretive atmosphere around the shoot. “I remember we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and not to tell anybody what we were filming — not to tell family or anything,” he told The Telegraph. “What they would do is print up maps to the location and leave them around, but they were false locations. Somebody from the press would sneak on set and steal these maps and they were just sort of locations of the shopping mall that’s closed, way way out in the Valley.”

The production didn’t need any gawkers, since the set was already packed with an unprecedented number of cast and crew. “We couldn’t believe it was just for one music video,” Thomas continued. “It was a small city everywhere we went. There was a lot of police, a lot of security. And Landis, he would let people who made it there get pretty close, but behind a barrier. They had third and fourth and fifth assistant directors handling the crowd, which would be in numbers of two, three to four hundred, who had figured out where to go or had heard from one of the film crew or whatever, there watching on the set.”

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17. Jackson (reportedly) had his father escorted off the set

Filming was occasionally marred by Jackson’s eccentricities. One detail in Vanity Fair’s profile of the shoot had him showing up 45 minutes late to a makeup session, infuriating Landis, and returning from a bathroom break carrying his boa constrictor, Muscles, whom he proceeded to drape around the reporter’s neck. 

The shoot was also distinguished by a series of high-profile visitors. Rock Hudson and Fred Astaire both dropped in, as did Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who edited Jackson’s Moonwalk autobiography. Another Hollywood heavy was Marlon Brando, who gave Jackson acting advice. One day when Landis chastised Jackson for flubbing lines, Jackson shot back, “Marlon told me to always go for the truth, not the words.” 

Other, less fun visitors, included Jackson’s parents, Joseph and Katherine, which caused a minor stir. Landis told Vanity Fair: “Michael asked me to have Joe removed. He said, ‘Would you please ask my father to leave?’ So I go over to Mr. Jackson. ‘Mr. Jackson, I’m sorry, but can you please … ?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m John Landis. I’m directing this.’ ‘Well, I’m Joe Jackson. I do what I please.’ I said, ‘I’ll have to ask security to remove you if you don’t leave now.’ ” Landis told the mag he had a policeman escort Joe Jackson off the set, which Jackson, through his lawyer, denied.

18. Jackson nearly had the video shelved for religious reasons

As the project moved out of shooting and finished editing, Jackson’s religious beliefs nearly caused the entire project to be shelved. Two weeks before the premiere, the singer called his lawyer John Branca and ordered him to destroy the negative of “Thriller.” Representatives for the Jehovah’s Witnesses — of which Jackson was a devout practitioner —  had gotten wind of the project and, believing that it promoted demonology, told Jackson that they would excommunicate him if the video saw the light of day. Branca, wary of all the money they’d sunk into this, convinced Landis to remove the film canisters from the processing lab and locked them up in his office to prevent destruction.

Jackson apparently was struggling with some inner demons in this period. Shortly after he ordered the tapes destroyed, Landis received a call from the singer’s security chief informing him that Jackson had locked himself in his room for three days, refusing to eat. Landis immediately drove to his estate and kicked down the door. After a trip to the doctor, Jackson apologized to Landis for wanting to destroy the film. Landis then informed him that his order has been ignored. “I said, ‘Michael, I wouldn’t let it be destroyed,’ ” he recalled to Vanity Fair. “He went, ‘Really? Because I think it’s really good.’ I go, ‘Michael, it’s great and you’re great.’ ”

Branca eventually resorted to fibbing to Jackson to preserve the work: He added to Vanity Fair, “I said, ‘Mike, did you ever watch Bela Lugosi in Dracula?’ He goes, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Do you know that he was a devout Christian?’ I was just making it up. And I said, ‘Did you ever notice there were, like, disclaimers on those movies?’ He goes, ‘No.’ ‘So, Michael, before we destroy this film, let’s put a disclaimer on it saying that this does not reflect the personal convictions of Michael Jackson.’ ”

19. The ‘Thriller’ video had a star-studded premiere — where they played it twice

That settled, “Thriller” was unveiled at the historic 500-seat Crest Theatre in Westwood on Nov. 14, 1983. The premiere was attended by the likes of Diana Ross, Warren Beatty, Prince, and Eddie Murphy. Landis warmed up the audience with a new print of the Mickey Mouse cartoon “The Band Concert,” and 14 minutes later, after “Thriller” received a rapturous standing ovation, was stuck for what to do next. Then Eddie Murphy yelled out “Show the goddamn thing again!” — which they did. 

The video premiered on MTV on Dec. 2. Former MTV executive Les Garland told Vanity Fair that the network settled on a saturation strategy he describes as “ ‘Every time we play ‘Thriller,’ let’s tell them when we are going to play it again.’ We played it three to five times a day. We were getting audience ratings 10 times the usual when we popped ‘Thriller.’ ” Showtime, meanwhile, aired Making Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ six times in February. Within months the Vestron release had sold 1 million copies, making it at the time the biggest-selling home-video release ever. 

Sadly, like so many other things in Jackson’s life, “Thriller” was subsumed in the financial chaos of his fame. In January 2009, six months before the star’s death, John Landis and co-producer George Folsey filed suit against Michael Jackson and his company Optimum Productions for breach of contract, alleging that they had not been paid their 50 percent of royalties in many years, and accusing Jackson of “fraudulent, malicious and oppressive conduct.”

20. The ‘Thriller’ video pushed the album to become the highest-seller in history

Originally the label planned for a Christmas 1982 release before pushing it into the following January to allow Jones and Jackson more time to tinker with the mixes. (There are famously 91 different mixes done of just “Billie Jean.”) But when the album leaked to radio and stations began playing multiple cuts, the label was forced to rush Thriller into stores on Nov. 30. The first single, “The Girl Is Mine” (featuring Paul McCartney), went to No. 2; then the label made the decision to go for broke and release “Beat It” while “Billie Jean” was still also climbing the charts. 

When the “Thriller” video came out, sales were juiced again, as Epic shipped upwards of 1 million units a week. With 32 million copies sold worldwide by the end of 1983, Thriller became the best-selling album of all time, and was ratified by Guinness World Records on Feb. 7, 1984. It was the best-selling album of 1983 worldwide, and in 1984 it became the first album to become the best-selling in the United States for two years. As of May 2022, Billboard put its global sales at more than 100 million copies. Branca’s industry-high royalty rate for Jackson — $2 per album — helped him become famously wealthy.

Thriller also became something of an albatross around Jackson’s neck: He fully expected it to be a stepping stone to an even higher peak, rather than the top of the mountain. When Bad came out and sold 20 million copies, Jackson was disappointed. He would ultimately never match the commercial success of Thriller again.