As an adult solo artist Michael Jackson set his sights as high as possible and dreamed of creating the best selling album in the world.

Michael's first album, "Off The Wall" had sold very well, over 15 million copies and Michael worked again with worked with Quincy Jones as producer and Rod Temperton writing some of the songs including the title "Thriller".

The albums aim was for every single to be a stand out track, and 7 of the albums 9 songs were released as singles. The exceptions being "Baby Be Mine" and "The Lady In My Life".

In promoting the album Michael was one of the first to use music videos to promote some of the songs. He created videos for 3 of the singles, Billie Jean, Beat It, and the Thriller video. After a slow start and some reported pressure from Michael the videos received regular plays on MTV which at the time was the worlds main satellite music channel and up until then rarely played music videos by black artists, including those by Michael.

In fact it was MTV who actually funded the 14 minute Thriller video which went on to become a record breaker in its own right after the record label had refused to fund a third album video, being fully satisfied with the albums success. The release of the Thriller video again sent album sales soaring.

Each video portrayed a story to go with the song, Michael often used to refer to these as short films rather than music videos.

Michael also teamed up again with Paul McCartney for the track "The Girl Is Mine" which was the first single to be released from the album.

Michael's sisters Janet Jackson and LaToya Jackson featured on back up vocals on "Pretty Young Thing".