I thought it would be very interesting to see how Michael Jackson's reputation and popularity has evolved since the start of his career—or at least since the start of the SPL database in 2006. My question of interest asks how various controversies and the death of Michael Jackson influenced the popularity of his music and the type of media published about him over time. There is without a doubt that Michael Jackson’s music has had an extremely positive influence over the music industry as a whole—although, do people separate the art from the artist in times of controversy?

In this investigation, I chose three types of media to analyze: discography, print, and film.

Discography

FROM spl_2016.outraw
WHERE
  (callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136B' OR
  callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136o' OR
  callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136N' OR
  callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136H' OR
  callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136M' OR
  callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136T' OR
  callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136T 2001' OR
  callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136T 2008' OR
  callNumber = 'CD 782.42166 J136H')
AND YEAR(cout) BETWEEN start_year AND end_year
GROUP BY title, bibNumber, itemtype
ORDER BY COUNTS

Print

First query:

SELECT title, bibNumber, itemtype, callNumber,COUNT(bibNumber) AS Counts
FROM spl_2016.outraw
WHERE title like '%michael jackson%' AND itemtype = 'acbk'
  AND title NOT LIKE '%malt%'
GROUP BY title, bibNumber, itemtype
ORDER BY COUNTS DESC
LIMIT 1000

Second query:

SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM spl_2016.outraw
WHERE title like '%michael jackson%' AND itemtype = 'acbk'
  AND title NOT LIKE '%malt%' AND title NOT LIKE '%beer%'
  AND YEAR(cout) BETWEEN start_year AND end_year

Film

SELECT title, bibNumber, itemtype, callNumber, COUNT(bibNumber) AS Counts
FROM spl_2016.outraw
WHERE ((title like '%michael jackson%' OR title = 'leaving neverland')
  AND callNumber != 'DVD 781.66 Un384 2015')
  AND itemtype = 'acdvd'
  AND YEAR(cout) BETWEEN start_year AND end_year
GROUP BY title, bibNumber, itemtype
ORDER BY COUNTS DESC
LIMIT 1000

Discography

Selected titles for querying:

Results for the year 2014. This type of query was performed for every yearly interval between 2009 and 2020.

Print

The first query returns a large number of titles relating to Michael Jackson:



I thought it was quite interesting to see the tone of language in the titles of the books—most of the books written are in memory of his tragic death and have titles that reflect the mourning and inspiration felt by the public after his death. This inspired me to visualize the most common words found in the titles listed using a generated word cloud:



Because we are primarily interested in investigating overall trends in Michael Jackson's popularity rather than the popularity of individual titles, the second query for print displays the total count of relevant checkouts in yearly intervals.

Film

The third category of media, films, reflects a similar sentiment to that expressed by books published about his life and career. Although there are far less Michael Jackson-related movies in the database, many of these movies have had a large impact on the general public, such as the documentary This Is It, which also has a popular corresponding soundtrack. Here are the results for the query: This query searches for titles with Michael Jackson’s name in it, in addition to the exception of Leaving Neverland. Additionally, it excludes a movie that is a Latin tribute to Michael Jackson, which didn’t seem directly relevant enough to include in the resulting data.

Discography

Checkout count for selected CD titles, plotted against time:



It’s clear that the steep increase in checkouts is a result of Michael Jackson’s death and the heavy press coverage. After this peak, there is a steady overall decrease in checkouts, which could be attributed to the subject wearing off in the press. Another possibly reason for this decline could be a result of an overall decrease in library checkouts as the internet became more popular for accessing music. The volume of data available from 2019 is not sufficient to draw conclusions about his musical popularity after Leaving Neverland, although analyzing trends in the other 2 mediums may reveal some insight into these later trends.

Print

The next graph visualizes yearly book checkouts relating to Michael Jackson from 2006-2019. Because of the volume of titles, it’s reasonable to group all of these titles under a single trend of total books relating to Michael Jackson that are checked out per year.



The ups and downs in this trend can be attributed to the release of books after his death that allowed to public to learn more about his personal life and details into his death. Although this amalgamation of data may hide some details into individual books that may have driven the trends, we can later take a closer look to see if this trend is a result of a few select releases or an overall increase interest in his life. Due to the sheer volume of related book checkouts, this category proves to be the most interesting because we can see nuances in trends over the years. For example, after a steady decline after his death, there was some event in 2013 that would gain some posthumous traction.

Film

I originally believed that the third category of movies would yield the most interesting results because of Leaving Neverland’s release in 2019. Unfortunately, the total number of checkouts from that movie is quite low since it’s likely that SPL only has a limited number of copies and the movie was released very recently. Additionally, there is an overall decrease in movie checkouts which may be a result of people using streaming services such as Netflix where content of interest is more quickly accessible. Since there only a few titles returned by the original query, we can actually take a look at trends for each individual title over the past few years.



This Is It was an iconic title that had almost immediate popularity when it was released after his death. Other films have never reached the level of popularity as that title, although there are slight nuances in each film’s popularity over the years. Although it’s hard to see, Searching for Neverland was a film that gained some notable traction after its release in 2016 in which it attracted some relative popularity for a couple of years.

All datasets are credited to the Seattle Public Library.
PDF of full report