Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” climbs from No. 20 to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 dated November 14, the highest position the song has ever reached on the chart. It passes the No. 4 peak the single set in March 1984, more than 42 years ago.
Only one song kept it from the top. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” holds at No. 1 for a 27th week, extending its own record as the longest-running No. 1 in Hot 100 history. Billboard summed up the top of the chart in one line: “Langley’s smash extends its record No. 1 run as Jackson’s ’80s classic howls to a new high at No. 2.”
Join The iimiTV Letter
Enter your email and we will send you a confirmation link. Click it and your first edition lands on Friday.
Michael Jackson Thriller Hot 100 Peak Took 42 Years
“Thriller” was the seventh and final single from Jackson’s 1982 album of the same name, released as a single in the United States in January 1984. Every one of the album’s seven singles reached the Hot 100 top 10, a first for any album, but the title track stopped at No. 4 in March 1984. For four decades that stood as one of the chart’s odd facts: the best-known song on the best-selling album of all time had never been a No. 1 single, and had never climbed past fourth place.
The song’s second chart life began in the streaming era. It has returned to the Hot 100 every Halloween season since 2018, when it re-entered at No. 31. It reached No. 19 in 2021, and last November it climbed to No. 10, making Jackson the first artist to score a Hot 100 top 10 hit in six different decades. This year it re-entered at No. 20 on the chart dated November 7, then jumped 18 places in a single week to its new peak. The climb also gives the song its first week at No. 1 on both Billboard’s Streaming Songs and Digital Song Sales charts, according to Billboard’s Hot 100 report.
The Halloween Week Behind The Climb
The November 14 chart covers the tracking week of October 30 to November 5, which held Halloween on Saturday, October 31. The calendar helped. Billboard’s tracking week runs Friday to Thursday, and with Halloween falling on a Saturday this year, the Friday before it and the holiday itself landed inside the same tracking week, stacking the two biggest listening nights of the song’s year into one tally. Billboard had flagged the race in late October, noting that early streams for “Thriller” were running 42 percent ahead of the same point last year.
The build was visible a week earlier. On the November 7 chart, “Thriller” drew 9.3 million chart-eligible streams in the United States, up 49 percent, while its radio audience doubled to 4.2 million and its sales rose 61 percent to 3,000, according to Luminate data reported by Billboard. Two more Halloween titles returned alongside it: Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” which features Jackson on backing vocals, at No. 39 with 6.3 million streams, and “This Is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas, credited to the Citizens of Halloween, at No. 41 with 6.1 million streams. On Halloween night itself, “Thriller” reached No. 1 on Spotify’s global chart for the first time, with 6.606 million streams worldwide on October 31, more than double its total the day before.
The rest of the top of the November 14 chart underlines how seasonal the week was. Tame Impala and JENNIE’s “Dracula” rises to a new No. 3 high and holds at No. 1 on Radio Songs, while Langley’s winning numbers stayed steady at 18.8 million streams, 53 million in radio airplay audience and 4,000 sold, as reported from the chart data.
The Album Matches The Song At No. 2
The single did not climb alone. The Thriller album vaults from No. 13 to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 dated November 14, its highest position on that chart since the spring of 1984, when it logged its 37th and final week at No. 1. The album earned 55,000 equivalent album units in the tracking week, up 89 percent, and finished just behind Olivia Rodrigo’s album at No. 1 with 57,000 units.
The detail inside that total is the physical story. Album sales rose 335 percent to 22,000 copies, the album’s largest sales week in nearly four years, and 19,000 of those were vinyl, the album’s biggest vinyl week since Luminate began electronically tracking sales in 1991. An October 30 reissue across three new vinyl variants and a cassette drove the buying, while streaming equivalent units added 32,000, drawn from 34.34 million on-demand streams of the album’s songs. The album has now spent 743 weeks on the Billboard 200, and the No. 2 rank is Jackson’s highest on the chart since his posthumous album Xscape peaked at No. 2 in 2014. The renewed catalogue run has a second engine beyond Halloween: reporting on this week’s chart notes the effect of the Michael biopic, described as the highest-grossing biopic of all time, and puts Jackson’s catalogue at more than three billion Spotify streams this calendar year, with Gen Z listeners accounting for nearly half of them.
Christmas Arrives On The Same Chart
What makes the November 14 chart unusual is that Halloween’s peak week and Christmas’s first week landed on the same list. Billboard’s Chart Beat column framed the chart as a dual-holiday week, with Wham!’s “Last Christmas” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” returning to the Hot 100 while the Halloween titles were still climbing. Carey’s song is part of the summit story too: its 22 weeks at No. 1 stood as the Hot 100 record until “Choosin’ Texas” passed it this year, and it still sits second on Billboard’s longest-running No. 1 list, ahead of Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” at 19 weeks each.
The same crossover played out in Britain a week earlier, with verified numbers from the Official Charts Company. On the UK chart published November 6, “Thriller” rose to a new all-time UK peak of No. 5, its first trip into the British top five, with consumption up 74 percent week on week. On that same chart, “Last Christmas” re-entered at No. 54 and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” at No. 82, and the Official Charts Company confirmed both were the earliest returns to the UK Top 100 that either song has ever made.
Halloween songs normally fall away the week after the holiday, and Christmas songs normally take their place a few weeks later. This year the handover happened inside a single chart, and it carried a 1983 single to a peak it never reached in its own era. Whatever happens on next week’s chart, the November 14 list is now the permanent record: “Thriller,” No. 2, 42 years after No. 4.
