Perhaps mentioning Thriller's age in the album title wasn't a good idea?

Michael Jackson is grumpy that old album Thriller has been kept off the Billboard album charts because it's an old album.

For reasons that we can only conclude are to do with being kind to Nickelback new releases, Billboard have a separate chart for catalogue releases, upon which Thriller 25 sits, like a shop-soiled colossus. Jackson's current people are upset:

one source says, "It has six new songs. Michael went into the studio and recorded with Kanye West, Fergie, Akon, Will.i.Am - and there's a brand-new song from Michael, and videos. It beat Grammy winners Amy Winehouse and Herbie Hancock, with 167,000 crossing the counter. Yet for reasons unfathomable to folks in the music industry, Billboard has decided to relegate it to the catalogue chart. Catalogue makes it look like same ol' same ol', but with a new cover.

"Michael expected it to be on the Top 200 chart."

Actually, this 'source' underestimates what the chart does - it doesn't even look like it's got a new cover, just the old one with a big number slapped on it.

The protests might have a little more weight if the official product description didn't call the thing a reissue. It can't be simultaneously a reissue and a new album, can it?

Billboard's call is fair enough - after all, it's not like anyone is buying the record because it's got some godawful wibbly Fergie nonsense slapped on it.

What is interesting, though, is the revelation that it's outselling Hancock and Winehouse - and yet has managed just a smidge over one and a half hundred thousand, which puts Amy's sales at somewhere shy of that figure. It might be a nice sounding chart position, but in sales terms, with the bounce of the Grammys telecast, it's not that good for either Amy or the US music industry as a whole, is it? A few tens of thousands of sales after all that exposure is an American public yawning and scratching.