A rival music data service, BuzzAngle, traced a similar pattern. According to BuzzAngle, weekly streams for Mr. Jackson this year hovered around 16 million until the middle of February, when they shot up to 22.8 million, suggesting that publicity for the documentary had stirred interest. By last week the totals had settled down, to 17.1 million.
Could those numbers fall? In the days after the film, news blips suggested that Mr. Jackson’s legacy was slowly being affected. The producers of “The Simpsons” pulled a 28-year-old episode featuring Mr. Jackson’s voice from circulation. Radio stations in Canada and New Zealand said they would stop playing Mr. Jackson’s music. A statue of the star was removed from a British soccer museum.
Radio stations in the United States have been cautious, significantly reducing the number of plays of Mr. Jackson’s music. According to Nielsen, Mr. Jackson’s songs have been played about 2,000 times a day on American radio stations in recent months. That number began to slip in February, and since the documentary aired it has dropped sharply, to about 1,500 a day through Sunday.
“The court of public opinion seems to have convicted Michael, but at the same time, he has supporters who love him,” said David Bakula, a senior analyst at Nielsen. “For the long term, it might take two or three weeks for this to settle into a pattern.”
The comedian Pete Davidson described what fans of Mr. Jackson and R. Kelly, who faces accusations of sexual misconduct with underage girls, have been wrestling with on the most recent episode of “Saturday Night Live.” “You don’t know how good someone’s music really is until you find out they’re a pedophile,” Mr. Davidson said during a “Weekend Update” segment.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/business/media/michael-jackson-music.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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