"Thriller" is the sixth studio album by the American singer and songwriter Michael Jackson, released on November 29, 1982, by Epic Records. The album was produced by Quincy Jones, who had previously collaborated with Jackson on his 1979 album Off the Wall. Jackson set out to create an album where "every song was a killer," and he moved in a new musical direction, incorporating a mix of pop, post-disco, rock, funk, synth-pop, and R&B with darker themes. Paul McCartney made his first credited appearance as a featured artist on a Jackson album.
Recording for Thriller took place from April to November 1982 at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles, California, with a budget of $750,000. The album became Jackson's first number-one album on the US Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart, where it spent a record 37 non-consecutive weeks at number one, from February 26, 1983, to April 14, 1984. Seven singles were released from the album: "The Girl Is Mine," "Billie Jean," "Beat It," "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," "Human Nature," "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)," and "Thriller." All of them reached the top 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, with "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" both reaching number one.
Jackson's performance of "Billie Jean" during the Motown 25 television special, where he debuted his signature moonwalk dance, helped catapult the album’s sales, which began to sell one million copies per week. Sales surged further after the release of the iconic Thriller music video on MTV in December 1983. By the end of 1983, Thriller had sold 32 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling album of all time. It was the best-selling album of 1983 globally, and in 1984, it became the first album to be the best-selling in the United States for two consecutive years.
The album's success set new industry standards, influencing artists, record labels, producers, marketers, and choreographers. Thriller helped break racial barriers in popular music, earning Jackson regular airplay on MTV and leading to a meeting with US President Ronald Reagan at the White House. It was one of the first albums to use music videos as promotional tools, with the videos for "Billie Jean," "Beat It," and "Thriller" helping to transform music videos into an art form.
Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time, with an estimated 70 million copies sold worldwide. It is also the best-selling non-compilation album and the second-best-selling album overall in the United States, having been certified 34× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2021. At the 1984 Grammy Awards, Thriller won a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for "Beat It." Jackson also won a record-breaking eight American Music Awards at the 1984 ceremony, including the Merit Award. Thriller is frequently included in lists of the greatest albums of all time, and in 2008, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The Library of Congress also added it to the National Recording Registry for being a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant recording."
