5 things to remember about Michael Jackson

Even in death, he sets — and breaks — records

Jackson’s death from acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication on June 25, 2009, after suffering from cardiac arrest, did little to halt his intimidating records.

News of his death generated such heavy Internet traffic that websites slowed down and crashed from user overload. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times suffered outages.  Twitter reported a crash, as did Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly a million visitors to Jackson’s biography within one hour, and this was probably the most visitors in a one-hour period to any article in Wikipedia’s history. AOL Instant Messenger collapsed for 40 minutes, AOL describing it as “a seminal moment in Internet history”. “We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth,” it said.

Jackson became the best-selling albums artist of 2009, after his death. He sold over 8.2 million albums in the United States, and a total of 35 million albums worldwide, in the 12 months that followed his death.

Jackson became the first artist to sell one million downloads in a week in download history, with a record-breaking 2.6 million downloads of his songs. After his death, three of his albums sold more than any new album — the first time a catalog album ever scanned more sales than any new album. Jackson also became the first artist in history to have four of the top 20 best-selling albums in a single year in the United States.

Watch one of Michael’s prominent songs, Moonwalker :

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