Michael Jackson’s Catalog Keeps Climbing in Week 3 of ‘Michael,’ and Janet Is Feeling the Spillover

Three weeks into the release cycle around Michael, Michael Jackson’s music is still doing the heavy lifting. His solo catalog posted another personal best in the May 1-7 tracking week, and the numbers suggest the film’s momentum is far from spent. Janet Jackson, who does not appear in the biopic and is never mentioned in it, has also picked up a smaller but noticeable bump of her own. Elsewhere, a pair of very different 2010s-era songs are finding fresh life through sync, TikTok, and the kind of algorithmic memory that can turn old hits into current obsessions again.

Jackson’s streaming surge keeps resetting the bar

Michael Jackson has now broken his own weekly streaming record three weeks in a row. According to Luminate, his solo catalog reached 181.6 million official on-demand song streams in the United States for May 1-7, a 32% jump from the previous week’s 137.6 million. That earlier total had already represented a 146% leap from the 55.9 million streams Jackson posted before the biopic began lifting demand in earnest.

“Billie Jean” remained the center of gravity, collecting 14.8 million official on-demand streams, up 31.7% from 11.3 million the week before. That renewed pull pushed the seven-week former Hot 100 No. 1 back up the chart, from No. 38 to No. 17. Two other Thriller staples followed close behind: “Beat It” with 11.4 million plays and “Human Nature” with 10.8 million.

The trajectory is still pointing upward. Early Luminate reports from May 8-10 already show Jackson’s catalog passing 86 million official on-demand streams in just three days. If the pace holds anywhere near the high 20 millions per day range, another weekly record is in play. A 200 million-plus week is still a long shot, but the fact that it can even be discussed says plenty about the afterlife of this catalog when a major film reintroduces it to the market.

Janet Jackson gets a smaller but real lift

Janet Jackson’s absence from Michael has been one of the louder talking points around the film. She was neither portrayed nor named, despite being the youngest Jackson sibling and an artist with her own long pop history. La Toya Jackson said Janet “kindly declined” to be depicted in the movie, but the box office success of the biopic has still reached her streaming numbers.

For the week ending May 7, Janet pulled in more than 9.4 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate. That is her best weekly total of 2026 so far and a 31% increase from the 6.9 million streams she logged two weeks earlier, during the Apr. 17-23 tracking period.

Some of that rise can be traced to “Scream,” the lone song credited to both Michael and Janet Jackson, which generated nearly 1.2 million streams in the latest week on its own. But even after stripping out that duet, Janet’s catalog is still up 20% from two weeks earlier, a gain of nearly 1.4 million streams. For an artist who has long existed in the shadow of the Jackson family name even while building a separate legacy, the bump is modest compared with her brother’s, but still meaningful.

At this point, the question feels less like whether Janet can benefit from this renewed attention and more whether the industry will eventually get its own version of the story built around her. A Janet biopic seems less like a reach than an inevitability.

The Chemical Brothers’ “Go” becomes a sync-fueled sleeper hit again

Netflix’s Apex, a survival thriller starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, has also given The Chemical Brothers a significant streaming jolt. The 2015 track “Go”, featuring Q-Tip, appears in the film’s official trailer, which arrived on March 25, and later in the movie itself after Apex landed on Netflix on April 24.

As the film picked up viewers, Egerton’s unsettling dance scene set to the song started circulating as a meme challenge. On TikTok, the official “Go” sound now has more than 68,000 clips, with many users recreating or parodying the film’s “I thought you liked danger” line. The track has also turned up in nearly 60,000 Instagram Reels, where runners and gym regulars have latched onto it as a soundtrack for effort and performance.

The streaming numbers moved fast. Before Apex hit Netflix, “Go” had just over 91,000 official on-demand U.S. streams in the week of Apr. 17-23. During the film’s debut week, that climbed more than 431% to over 487,000. By May 1-7, it had jumped again by 167% to 1.3 million. Over two weeks, the song’s activity has risen by more than 1,319%. The payoff is immediate and measurable: “Go” is now The Chemical Brothers’ highest-charting hit on Dance/Electronic Songs, where it sits at No. 9.

Katy Perry’s “The One That Got Away” finds a second life in the fandom economy

Katy Perry has spent plenty of time in the headlines lately, but the latest turn has everything to do with a song from 2011. “The One That Got Away,” the sixth single from Teenage Dream, originally peaked at No. 3 and helped extend one of the defining pop runs of the 2010s. Fifteen years later, it is back in circulation for reasons that say as much about online fandom habits as they do about Perry’s own catalog power.

Over the past year, the ballad has been slowly gathering steam across streaming and social media. In winter, fans used it to score farewells to fictional romances, especially after the final season of Stranger Things aired in November and December. By spring, the song had taken on a wider life cycle: some users paired it with videos about escaping domestic violence or defending loved ones, while others attached it to fictional pairings from Euphoria, imagined friendships between Rihanna and Perry herself, or Manon’s hiatus from KATSEYE. There has also been a steady strain of nostalgia, with users pointing out how intensely the song still lands 15 years on.

The streaming data tracks that spread. “The One That Got Away” logged more than 2.8 million official on-demand U.S. streams in the week of March 6-12. By April 3-9, that figure had climbed nearly 40% to over 3.9 million, and by May 1-7 it had risen another 56% to more than 6.2 million. That amounts to a 118% increase in two months.

Perry has clearly noticed. On April 21, she shared a “director’s cut” of the video, narrated by Stevie Nicks, and later used an acoustic version alongside clips from her Met Gala prep. She also poked at Josh Groban’s engagement announcement by overlaying “Got Away” on a screenshot of the news. On May 13, she released a new compilation called The One That Got the Plays, placing the song at the top of the tracklist. The result is a neat example of how a once-radio-dominant pop single can become something else entirely when a new generation starts using it as a shorthand for grief, longing, and irony all at once.

With all that movement, “The One That Got Away” is now Perry’s highest-charting entry on the Billboard Global 200 since the chart launched in September 2020, where it sits at No. 37.