Thriller (Michael Jackson album) the opinion that he was a "musical phenomenon" and that "in the world of pop music, there is Michael Jackson and there is everybody else". Jackson changed the way the industry functioned: both as an artistic persona and as a financial, profitable entity. His attorney John Branca observed that Jackson achieved the highest royalty rate in the music industry to that point: approximately $2 (US$ in dollars) for each album sold. As a result, Jackson earned record-breaking profits from compact disc sales and from the sale of copies of the documentary, "The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller", produced by Jackson
Thriller (Michael Jackson album) leisure item—like a magazine, a toy, tickets to a hit movie—and started selling like a household staple". At the time of the album's release, a press statement from Gil Friesen, the then President of A&M Records, read that, "The whole industry has a stake in this success". "Time" magazine speculated that "the fallout from "Thriller" has given the [music] business its best years since the heady days of 1978, when it had an estimated total domestic revenue of $4.1 billion". "Time" summed up "Thriller"s impact as a "restoration of confidence" for an industry bordering on "the ruins of punk and