In a small Brazilian town, Gleidson Rodrigues — known professionally as Gleidson Jackson — found himself at a bachelor party he did not fully understand. The client had booked both a Michael Jackson impersonator and a Madonna tribute act, and the evening’s tone was, as Rodrigues later put it, one where “you can imagine” the rest. He had been performing as the King of Pop for more than 25 years, but the months following the release of the biopic Michael brought a vertiginous shift: his bookings leapt from a dozen in the same period a year earlier to over 50, a 300 per cent increase that forced him to turn down daily offers simply to preserve his body and his logistics. Across Brazil, the film’s box-office dominance — it became the highest-grossing musical biopic of all time — translated into a parallel economy for tribute artists, who hastily reworked setlists to include the Bad-era songs featured on screen and found themselves playing not only to lifelong fans but to children and teenagers curious about a performer who died before they were born.

That same biopic effect rippled through the United Kingdom’s streaming charts, where The Essential Michael Jackson returned to number one on the Official Albums Streaming ranking for a sixth non-consecutive week, while the soundtrack Michael: Songs From the Motion Picture held the top spot on the soundtracks tally for a tenth frame. The compilation’s reign was not uninterrupted — it had slipped to second place only three times since mid-May — but its persistence underscored a pattern observers in London have noted: a well-timed film can reactivate a catalogue with a force that radio playlists alone rarely achieve. In Brazil, the two most prominent Jackson impersonators diverged on the film’s artistic merit, with one calling it a celebration that remained superficial, yet both agreed it had expanded their audience far beyond the usual devotees.

This reanimation of back catalogues is not confined to cinema. In the same UK charts, a 30th-anniversary reissue of Tina Turner’s Wildest Dreams — complete with remastered audio and previously unreleased live recordings — debuted at number 26 on the sales-only list, marking the late singer’s twelfth appearance there, half of which have occurred since her death in 2023. Metallica’s Reload, remastered and repackaged with three live vinyl LPs, 15 CDs, multiple DVDs and a seven-inch single, entered the vinyl chart at number five and the main sales chart at number four, becoming the band’s tenth top 10 on the former. Lady Gaga’s Joanne, a decade old and often remembered for its Americana turn, resurfaced on opaque pink marbled vinyl, reaching a new peak of number 19 on the vinyl ranking. These physical artefacts — box sets, coloured wax, anniversary editions — are not mere nostalgia purchases; they are objects that invite a different kind of listening, one that sales charts, which exclude streaming, are uniquely positioned to measure.

An Italian music blogger, who had publicly dismissed Madonna as “pathetic,” sat down on the third of July to listen to Confessions on a Dance Floor 2, the sequel to her 2005 club masterpiece. He expected a massacre, a self-inflicted comparison that would confirm her decline. Instead, he found a record that did not try to recreate the past but simply remembered how to be Madonna: a continuous, bass-driven flow produced again with Stuart Price, built for loudspeakers rather than background play. He listened once, then twice, then three times, and wrote a single line that captured the reluctant surrender of a sceptic confronted with craft: “Mannaggia a lei. A questa chi l’ammazza?” — damn her, who can kill this one? It was the sound of a listener, alone with the music, conceding that the old push was still there.