Michael Jackson and the Fat Middle

No, this is not a wacko conspiracy theory. Really. Let me explain.

The major media's business is to create blockbusters, and nothing defines blockbuster as succinctly as Michael Jackson's 1983 album Thriller. By now you know, if you couldn't have guessed before, that Thriller is the best-selling music album of all time, having sold a total of more than 100 million records and CDs. At the time it came out, Thriller dominated record sales like nothing before or since.

In January 1984, about 13 months after the album was released, the New York Times reported that Thriller had sold 21 million copies in the United States. The second best-selling album of that year was Men at Work's Business as Usual, which hit the top of the album charts at the end of 1982; it had a total of 6 million in sales. But January 1984 wasn't the end of Thriller's run. Driven by the release of Jackson's epic music video, Thriller was also the top-selling album throughout 1984—the only album to hold the No. 1 U.S. spot for two years.

The dominance of Michael Jackson in music was paralleled at the beginning of the '80s by the dominance of Steven Spielberg's E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark and George Lucas' Star Wars sequels in the movies. The Empire Strikes Back (1980), E.T. (1982), and Return of the Jedi (1983) each sold (in the United States) more than twice as many tickets the year they were released as the No. 2 movie, and Raiders of the Lost Ark came very close to that mark in 1981.

Over the years, a lot of folks—some worried about how to sell movies and records, some worried about the state of the culture, some peering into the future of media—have seesawed back and forth about how much blockbusters like these will rule the culture business. The most influential best-seller of the 1990s on the subject was economist Robert H. Frank's Winner Takes All Society, which argued that more and more of the spoils in every field would be concentrated among a few winners. On the other hand, more recently, Wired editor Chris Anderson, in The Long Tail, argued the opposite: that media was progressing toward an ever-growing "long tail" of niche interests.

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