quality:corruption
Posthumous sales

At the 2009 American Music Awards, Jackson won four posthumous awards, including two for his compilation album Number Ones, bringing his total American Music Awards to 26. In the year after his death, more than 16.1 million copies of Jackson's albums were sold in the US alone, and 35 million copies were sold worldwide, more than any other artist in 2009. He became the first artist to sell one million music downloads in a week, with 2.6 million song downloads. Thriller, Number Ones and The Essential Michael Jackson became the first catalog albums to outsell any new album. Jackson also became the first artist to have four of the top-20 bestselling albums in a single year in the US. Within the year following his death, Jackson sold over 75 million records worldwide. By the end of 2013, Michael Jackson had sold over 50 million albums worldwide since his death

Following the surge in sales, in March 2010, Sony Music signed a $250 million deal (equivalent to $ 350 million in 2023) with the Jackson estate to extend their distribution rights to Jackson's back catalog until at least 2017; it had been due to expire in 2015. It was the most expensive music contract for a single artist in history. They agreed to release ten albums of previously unreleased material and new collections of released work. The deal was extended in 2017. That July, a Los Angeles court awarded Quincy Jones $9.4 million of disputed royalty payments for Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. In July 2018, Sony/ATV bought the estate's stake in EMI for $287.5 million.

In 2014, Jackson became the first artist to have a top-ten single in the Billboard Hot 100 in five different decades. The following year, Thriller became the first album to be certified for 30 million shipments by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). A year later, it was certified 33× platinum after Soundscan added streams and audio downloads to album certifications.

In February 2024, Sony Music acquired half of Jackson's publishing rights and recording masters for an estimated $600 million. The deal includes assets from Jackson's Mijac publishing catalog, but excludes royalties from several Jackson-related productions, including the MJ Broadway musical and the Michael biopic. The deal is possibly the largest transaction ever for a single musician's work.