Immediately after Michael Jackson’s death, sales surged as fans purchased music and DVDs from the King of Pop in both physical and digital formats. Jackson’s music quickly topped the sales charts on retailers like iTunes and Amazon. Last week, the search term ‘michael jackson albums’ ranked 16th among the search terms driving traffic to Amazon. Not only topping the charts, Michael Jackson was also the top of search term variations for ‘songs’ last week where ‘michael jackson songs’ ranked 1st and ‘michael jackson’s top songs’ ranked 5th.

For retailers and publishers looking to prioritize merchandise and content, one measure to predict demand among consumers is through search data. When looking at the variations of searches that included the search term ‘michael jackson’, we classified the top 1000 terms from the week ending June 27, 2009, to find the most popular song & album and lyric searches. Many searches were very broad, looking for the ‘best’ and ‘top’ michael jackson songs, but the specific songs & albums that were searched most were Thriller and Off The Wall. Searches for lyrics were also common, with the most popular being “Beat It” and “Billie Jean”.
The top 5 songs & albums based on the top 1000 search terms including ‘michael jackson’ for the week ending June 27, 2009.
Top 5 Songs & Albums
1. Thriller
2. Off The Wall
3. You Are Not Alone
4. Bad
5. Ben
Top 5 Lyrics
1. Beat It
2. Billie Jean
3. You Are Not Alone
4. Bad
5. Ben