Olivia Rodrigo Beat 'Thriller' by 2,000 Units — and Got Outsold Doing It

The Billboard 200 dated November 14 has a No. 1 album that lost the week in almost every way that involves a purchase. Olivia Rodrigo's you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is back on top for a fourth week with 57,000 equivalent album units, according to Billboard's chart report with data compiled by Luminate. That total is down 10% from the album's own previous week, and it is the smallest winning total on this chart in more than a year — SZA's SOS led with 52,000 on the chart dated May 3, 2025. Two thousand units behind Rodrigo sits Thriller.

The two albums got to the same neighbourhood by opposite roads. Of Rodrigo's 57,000 units, 49,500 were streaming-equivalent — 53.33 million on-demand streams of the album's songs — and just 7,500 were copies actually sold. Thriller earned its 55,000 the other way around: 22,000 copies sold, up 335%, its biggest sales week in nearly four years, with 19,000 of those on vinyl — the album's largest vinyl week since Luminate began electronically tracking sales in 1991 — plus 32,000 streaming units (34.34 million streams) and 1,000 track-equivalent units.

Michael Jackson's album outsold hers nearly three to one, jumped from No. 13 to No. 2, and reached its highest position on this chart since the list dated April 14, 1984, the week it completed its 37th and final week at No. 1. It still finished second, because the modern chart pays for streams at scale, and Rodrigo's audience streams every week whether or not a holiday is attached.

Halloween built Thriller's week — an October 30 reissue in three vinyl variants and a cassette met the one week a year when the title track takes over, and Previously told that side of this chart when it posted. The seasonal part of the story will fade on schedule. Rodrigo's side of it does not have a season.

The album, her third, produced by Dan Nigro and released June 12 on Geffen, opened on top of the June 27 chart with 485,000 first-week units — the biggest solo debut of 2026 — and has now spent 21 weeks on the chart without once dropping out of the top five. Its third week at No. 1, on the October 31 chart, followed the "expectations" remix with Chappell Roan, Roan's first-ever feature; the fourth week arrived with no new single, no reissue and no event — just the catalogue doing its weekly work. It also held No. 1 on Top Streaming Albums for a seventh week.

Thriller's own staying power is real, and it predates the Halloween spike: the album has sat in the top 20 every week since early May, including 15 straight weeks in the top 10 through August carried by the Michael biopic. It still holds the record that matters most on this chart — 37 weeks at No. 1, the most by any album from a single artist; only the West Side Story soundtrack, with 54 weeks in 1962-63, has spent longer on top. But a catalogue album's surge needs a reason — a holiday, a film, a reissue — and the reason expires. A current album's floor just needs an audience that keeps pressing play.

Underneath the fight, the rest of the top 10 reads like the year in miniature. Morgan Wallen's I'm the Problem holds No. 3 with 49,000 units. Ella Langley's Dandelion sits at No. 4 with 45,000 — the same week "Choosin' Texas" holds the Hot 100's No. 1 spot for a record 27th week, which puts one artist on top of the singles chart and inside the albums top five at the same time.

Noah Kahan has two albums in the top 10 at once: The Great Divide at No. 5 (40,000) and Stick Season at No. 8 (33,000). ILLIT's BREAK EVEN debuts at No. 6 with 37,000 units, 32,500 of them sales — the buying-led mirror of Rodrigo's week, one row down. BigXthaPlug's Better Over Time enters at No. 7 (35,000), Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl slips from No. 6 to No. 9 (30,000), and Queens of the Stone Age's Perfecth opens at No. 10 with 29,000, 25,000 of them sold.

The album's year has had its public moments, too. In August, Rodrigo headlined the first Daisy Chain Fields, her own one-day festival at Great Park in Irvine, where Melinda French Gates doubled the day's giving to $20 million for organisations supporting women and girls, and where Stevie Nicks joined her onstage. In September, the Grammy Museum opened "the cure unraveled," an exhibition built around the handmade hospital of the album's "the cure" video, with Rodrigo performing at the launch. None of that is chart machinery in the way a vinyl reissue is chart machinery. It is the slower thing: an audience being given reasons, all year, to keep the record in rotation.

What this chart is measuring now is not a big week. It is a floor. The No. 1 album in America won with 57,000 units because nobody else's week was bigger, and nobody else's week was bigger because the albums that sell in bursts — a reissue, a debut, a holiday — take turns spiking and falling back. Rodrigo's album has not fallen back in 21 weeks. The next chart will test it against nothing in particular, which is precisely the kind of week it keeps winning.