Thriller

On the first day of recording, producer Quincy Jones walked into Westlake Studios in Los Angeles and told his team they were there to save the recorded music industry. He was not joking, and he was not wrong. Thriller went on to sell an estimated 70 million copies worldwide, spending 37 non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 and winning eight Grammy Awards. There has never been another album like it in terms of pure commercial reach, and there probably never will be.

Jackson was 24 years old. He wrote four of the nine songs himself, including "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," while Jones and songwriter Rod Temperton sifted through nearly 600 other candidates before selecting the remaining tracks. The album's title came to Temperton in a hotel room at three in the morning, after he had already generated two or three hundred other options. When three studios were running simultaneously to finish "Beat It," Eddie Van Halen was in one recording his guitar solo, Jackson was in another singing through a five-foot cardboard tube, and the mixing was happening in a third. The infamous spoken-word section of the title track used the voice of Vincent Price, who recorded his contribution in a single take and charged a flat fee of $20,000.

When Jackson unveiled the moonwalk on the Motown 25 television special while performing "Billie Jean," an estimated 47 million people watched. Thriller did not just top charts, it restructured the entire music industry around the idea that pop music and the short film were the same thing. Every artist who made a music video that mattered afterward was working in the shadow of what Jackson and Jones built here.