Just in time for spooky season, Michael Jackson’s iconic 1983 music video for “Thriller” has surpassed one billion YouTube views.

The milestone marks the King of Pop’s fourth visual to join the Billion Views Club after “Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” and “They Don’t Care About Us.” Directed by John Landis and boasting a voiceover from Vincent Price, the 13-minute clip aired on MTV in December 1983.

The video follows Jackson watching a scary movie with his date, which ultimately leads to a ghoulish full moon transformation and some now-instantly recognizable choreography by Michael Peters that Jackson performs alongside his fellow monsters and zombies.  

Following its release, in 1984, the single peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at No. 3 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs. Following Jackson’s death in 2009, the song returned to Billboard’s tallies, climbing to No. 2 on Hot Digital Songs. The same year, the video was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress — the first music video to ever receive this honor — for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant. “Thriller” is also the is the most-downloaded Halloween-themed hit of all-time, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan.

Since its release 40 years ago, the “Thriller” music video is often referenced in pop culture, most notably in the 2004 rom-com 13 Going on 30, where Jennifer Garner’s character reignites a boring party by recruiting the attendees into a venue-wide rendition of the choreography.

Rewatch Michael Jackson’s beloved “Thriller” music video above.

Luxury spirits brand Grand Marnier, renowned for its unique mix of cognac and orange liqueur, hosted an immersive experience for New York Fashion Week attendees. This one night only event dubbed, The Rouge Showroom, highlighted the brand’s dedication to creating unexpected, grand experiences that merged the worlds of fashion and music.

In collaboration with designer Brandon Blackwood, The Rouge Showroom attracted over 1,000 hip-hop fans and fashion lovers to LaVan Midtown for an unforgettable night. Guests mingled under vibrant red lights, sipping on signature Grand Marnier cocktails like the Grand Margarita. DJ Been Slacking kicked things off with an energetic set that kept everyone dancing.

The night’s highlight came from Billboard-charting rapper 2 Chainz, who thrilled fans with a performance of his biggest hits. He elevated the party atmosphere with classics such as “Birthday Song” and “It’s a Vibe,” creating an electric energy that resonated with fashion insiders and trendsetters.

Brandon Blackwood’s curated collection was displayed in a jukebox-inspired setup, alongside Grand Marnier bottles. Before 2 Chainz took the stage, Blackwood shared insights about the collection with the audience. Attendees also had the chance to capture memories at co-branded photo spots and even order custom Brandon Blackwood bags with personalized engravings to remember the night.

For Blackwood, this collaboration was about more than fashion; it celebrated individuality, creativity, and breaking boundaries. His designs, much like Grand Marnier’s signature flavors, artfully blend bold elements in a seamless and sophisticated way.

If you weren’t able to join us in New York, check out Billboard’s recap of the evening HERE and stay tuned for more from Billboard and Grand Marnier. 

Whether enjoying Grand Marnier at home listening to your favorite artist or out at their show, please do so responsibly.

Forget espresso — Sabrina Carpenter is ready to start sipping on eggnog. This holiday season, the 25-year-old pop star is helping fans get festive with a Netflix special titled A Nonsense Christmas, as announced Thursday (Sept. 19).

In a teaser clip posted to her Instagram, a camera pans up Carpenter’s body to show fur-trimmed boots, tights and a Playboy Bunny-esque red leotard before finally revealing her face. “Expecting someone else?” she says playfully, smirking as faux snow falls on her head.

“This is really gonna jingle your bells,” reads the video’s caption.

Arriving at 9 p.m. ET on Dec. 6 via the streaming service, A Nonsense Christmas is billed as a holiday variety show featuring musical guests and comedic cameos. The Work It star will also perform songs from her seasonal 2023 EP Fruitcake as well as treat viewers to covers of other festive hits and unexpected duets.

“The holidays have always been so special to me,” Carpenter said in a statement. “I am excited to bring my take to a classic holiday variety show — infusing my love of music and comedy to make something that is uniquely me.”

According to executive producer Michael D. Ratner of OBB Media, the project will “subvert the classic holiday special.” Directed by Sam Wrench, A Nonsense Christmas is backed by OBB as well as At Last Productions.

The news comes amid the third week of Carpenter’s reign atop the Billboard 200 with new album Short n’ Sweet, which dropped Aug. 23. The Disney Channel alum’s music career has exploded this year thanks to the success of singles “Please Please Please” — which became her first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 over the summer — “Espresso” and “Taste.”

Watch the A Nonsense Christmas teaser below.

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. We’ve already named our Honorable Mentions and our No. 25, No. 24, No. 23, No. 22, No. 21, No. 20, No. 19, No. 18 and No. 17 stars, and now we remember the century in Jay-Z — who redesigned crossover hip-hop stardom in his image and became one of the biggest pop culture icons of the entire century.

The best is not always the best-selling. Take the Porsche 911: Considered by many experts and fans alike to be pound-for-pound the best sports car money can buy, the rear-engined coupe sells only a fraction of what America’s number one pony car, the Ford Mustang, sells. Despite its motor being in the wrong place, the 911 is thought to be the platonic ideal of a sports car. It can do it all: deliver a transcendent driving experience, win prestigious motor races, do the weekly chore run, ferry a (small) family around, and look cool when parked on the block. Instead of introducing radical new ideas every model year, Porsche has worked to intensely refine and perfect the 911 over the course of its 75-year run.  

The closest thing Hip-Hop has to the Porsche 911 is Brooklyn’s own Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter. Throughout his storied three-decade career, Jay-Z never reached the commercial heights of some of his contemporaries but, much like the 911, he represented the platonic ideal of what a rapper should and could be – including as a crossover star, who was able to have major hits and top 40-level success without ever really changing who he was or sounding like he was actively chasing any of it. 

Hitting the scene in earnest in 1996 with his debut album Reasonable Doubt, Jay shared underworld tales and street knowledge in a cool unaffected manner that made it seem as if he was letting you in on a secret. With Death Row and Bad Boy dominating the charts in the mid-’90s, Jay worked to carve out a lane for himself as the guy who had one foot on the block and one foot in the boardroom. After not finding high-level commercial success with his debut, Jay recruited the team behind his friend The Notorious B.I.G.’s classic albums to create In My Lifetime, Vol. 1. Debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, Vol. 1. boasted minor hits in “The City Is Mine” and “(Always Be My) Sunshine” but proved that Jay had the propensity to make music that appealed to both radio program directors and true hip-hop heads.  

But the real breakthrough came with 1998’s Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life. This time around there was no big-name executive producer, just Jay-Z and his Roc-A-Fella partners Dame Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke. The star of the show was the 45 King-produced, Annie-sampling “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” that peaked at No. 15 on the Hot 100, becoming Jay-Z’s biggest hit up until that point and pushing Vol 2. to be Jay’s first No. 1 debut on the Hot 200. Suddenly the hustler from Marcy Projects was no longer toiling away in the shadow of NYC’s towering MCs — he was now one of its brightest stars. Over the next four years Jay-Z proved success does indeed beget success. He launched the careers of a few successful rap stars under his Roc-A-Fella imprint and stretched his earning potential with new clothing and liquor endeavors. But despite all that — as well as a bevy of rap hits and back-to-back Billboard 200 No. 1 albums — Jay’s best days were still far ahead of him.  

The new millennium got off to a crazy start for Jay, as he connected with the Neptunes for the first time for the lead single of what was supposed to be a label compilation album. The fun and uproarious “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)” became Jay’s first single to top the Hip-Hop/R&B chart and peaked at No. 11 on the Hot 100. The song was so big it reportedly inspired Britney Spears to tap the Virginia Beach-based production duo to work on her Britney album. The Dynasty: Roc-La-Familia also served a greater purpose still for the young rap mogul: It set the groundwork for what would become the best album of his career. Featured on Dynasty were three then-unknown producers – Ye (then Kanye West), Bink! and Just Blaze — who gave Jay a bunch of sample-based beats that were shimmering, soulful and gritty all at once. That sound would go on to anchor Jay’s sixth album, The Blueprint.   

In 2001, Jay was fighting battles on multiple fronts. He was taking verbal fire from NYC artists — Nas, Prodigy, and Jadakiss — who were none too happy with Jay’s claim to be the King of New York. And he was fighting two criminal cases: one for illegal gun possession and one for assault. During all that, Jay absconded to Miami to record what would become his magnum opus. Legend goes that Jay heard the beats and was so inspired he recorded the album in less than a week. The result would be a project that completely reordered the pantheon of rap greats: Sure, Reasonable Doubt is considered a classic, but the wider world didn’t take notice of it until years later. With The Blueprint, everyone knew immediately that Jay-Z had made the best rap album anyone had heard in years. From the scathing diss track “Takeover” to the tender “Song Cry” — and a pair of irresistible ‘00s pop-rap staples in the triumphant “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” and the hilariously rude “Girls, Girls, Girls” — The Blueprint, as Noah Callahan-Bever wrote, became just that: “Everything a great rap album should be, and, perhaps as importantly, nothing that it should not be.”  

Throughout his career, Jay always looked at himself as more than a rapper. Yes, he also claimed to be a hustler, but he more so saw himself as an enterprise. The famous bar wouldn’t come until 2005 when he hopped on a remix to Ye’s “Diamonds” record—in Jay’s eyes he’s not simply a businessman, he’s a business, man. And that sentiment really began to show in the early 2000s: So much so he felt he’d outgrown his role as a rapper to the point that he decided to retire, dropping a farewell project in The Black Album. And why not? By then he felt he had it all: He had five consecutive No. 1 albums, Roc-A-Fella was chugging along just nicely — and, in his immortal words, he had “the hottest chick in the game” wearing his chain in Beyoncé. He’d just scored two of his biggest pop hits to date alongside the then-burgeoning pop/R&B diva: His No. 3-peaking “Bonnie & Clyde ‘03” from the overstuffed sequel album Blueprint 2: The Gift and Curse, and her “Crazy in Love,” the Hot 100-topping breakout hit from Bey’s Dangerously in Love that set her on the path to all-time solo greatness. Things couldn’t be going better.  

But what other rapper could have made the entire world care about their retirement? He made culture stop. Fans actually mourned his career! We’d never seen someone go out on top; on their own terms. Especially after making what appeared to be all the right moves. It was no wonder the documentary he made about the making of his “last” album – 2004’s Fade to Black, which also captured his “retirement party” concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden, bringing hip-hop to the World’s Most Famous Arena at a time when it rarely got to command such stages — was itself a hit.  

Of course, he couldn’t leave the game alone, and wound up returning three years and a Def Jam Presidential stint later with the forgettable Kingdom Come. Tapping his usual list of producers to craft his comeback special, Jay suffered his first great misstep: He underestimated just how much the rap game had moved on in the time he was away. The South, and Atlanta in particular, was now the dominant force in rap– a reality helped bring forth by signing Young Jeezy to Def Jam. And with younger guys like T.I. able to seamlessly flow between grimy street records and wide aperture radio hits, Jay’s attempt felt, well, old. It didn’t help that he himself was struggling with how to be a rapper touching 40 years old.  

But Jay-Z’s true gift remained his ability to make people believe Jay-Z is the coolest person in the world. His ability to sell that idea has helped him sell everything else. When, on Blueprint 3, he declared Auto-Tune dead at the late height of its use within hip-hop in 2009, most people said “hm,” but went with it. (He had less success with getting people to stop wearing Timbs, but you can’t win ‘em all.) Nonetheless, his coolness is what made his BP3 collaboration with Alicia Keys, “Empire State of Mind” — a song that could have fallen flat and tumbled into cringe in the hands of a lesser artist — his first song to hit No. 1 on the Hot 100, and an enduring Big Apple anthem that even folks who couldn’t name a second Jay-Z song still know most of the words to.  

Another gift has been his ability to align himself with the right people at the right time. When he retired from rap and released The Black Album, Jay released a cappella versions of the album and let DJs and producers make new mash-up versions of the album. Danger Mouse’s career was birthed on the back of that release when he mixed it with beats sampling the Beatles’ White Album to create The Grey Album. That album also inspired Linkin Park and Jay to combine some of their songs together to create a six-song EP called Collision Course that wound up selling 368,000 copies first week and winning a Grammy for “Numb/Encore.”   

But Jay’s greatest collaborations would come years later. In 2011, he and his mentee Ye traversed the globe to record what would become Watch the Throne. A fully immersive experience, WTT spawned a roving art exhibit, a listening at NYC’s Hayden Planetarium, and a global tour that had them performing their smash hit “N—as In Paris” multiple times at every stop and 11 times in Paris. Lush, lavish, and luxurious, Watch the Throne had was the cultural high point of the past 24 years for both Jay-Z and Ye, positioning them both as not just rap stars but pop culture titans.  

A few years later, in 2014, Jay’s legend (and pop star bonafides) only grew greater when he and his now-wife Beyoncé decided to team up for what would become one of the best tours of the past 25 years, with the On the Run Tour. Boasting 21 shows across three countries, the all-stadium tour became one of the most successful in history, with $109 MM in ticket sales, according to Billboard Boxscore. It was so successful, the duo re-upped and did it again four years later. Could Jay have headlined a solo stadium tour 18 years into his career? Maybe, maybe not. But the important thing to remember is that he did embark on global stadium tours at a time in his career when most rappers from his generation wouldn’t be able book midsize venues in their home cities. 

Just like the venerable 911, Jay’s game was constant improvement. He didn’t sell like 50 Cent or Nelly or Eminem at their respective peaks. The only time he was able to sell a million in a week – sort of — was when he made a deal with Samsung to pre-load his Magna Carter…Holy Grail album on their phones, giving him a platinum plaque before it even hit stores. But his stranglehold on pop culture and his influence on cultural trends was unmatched (remember when he told everyone not to drive a BMW X5 and everyone, even people who couldn’t afford one in the first place, listened?). No one, besides Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Ye back when his name was still Kanye, has been able to affect the commercial decisions of young music fans as much as Jay had.  

Don’t take our word for it, though. Listen to Jay at the end of “What More Can I Say”:

The soul of a hustler, I really ran the streets/A CEO’s mind, that marketing plan was me/ And no I ain’t get shot up a whole bunch of times/ Or make up s—t in a whole bunch of lines / And I ain’t animated, like say, a Busta Rhymes/ But the real s—t you get when you bust down my lines/ Add that to the fact I went plat’ a bunch of times/ Times that by my influence on pop culture/ I supposed to be number one on everybody’s list.

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back on Tuesdsay when our No. 15 artist is revealed!

For the second time in 2024, Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” reigns on Billboard’s Top TV Songs chart, powered by Tunefind (a Songtradr company), this time following its synch in the first season of Apple TV+’s Time Bandits.

Rankings for the Top TV Songs chart are based on song and show data provided by Tunefind and ranked using a formula blending that data with sales and streaming information tracked by Luminate during the corresponding period of August 2024.

“Return of the Mack” can be heard in the eighth episode of Time Bandits, which premiered on Aug. 14 (as did episode seven). It earned 19.5 million official on-demand U.S. streams and 2,000 downloads in August 2024, according to Luminate.

“Return of the Mack” previously ruled Top TV Songs this year when it was heard in an episode of The Equalizer in May. It also led the November 2015 survey via a synch in Master of None.

The song was Morrison’s breakthrough in America, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1997.

In all, Time Bandits boasts three appearances on the 10-song Top TV Songs ranking. The Cardigans’ “Lovefool” and Spice Girls’ “Wannabe,” both also featured in episode eight, rank at Nos. 6 and 7, respectively; “Lovefool” earned 12.1 million streams and 1,000 downloads in August, while “Wannabe” racked up 8.7 million streams and 1,000 downloads.

The success of Time Bandits on the chart comes despite its recent cancellation by Apple TV+; after one season, its final episodes aired Aug. 21.

Kaos is the other top performer on the latest Top TV Songs ranking, with songs heard in the Netflix series’ first season (all of which premiered Aug. 29) taking Nos. 2 and 3.

Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” appears at No. 2 via 7.2 million streams and 1,000 downloads, while Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” is at No. 3 thanks to 6.4 million streams and 2,000 downloads.

See the full top 10, also featuring music from Reasonable Doubt, The Umbrella Academy and Industry, below.

Rank, Song, Artist, Show (Network)