James Safechuck holds rings he says Michael Jackson gave him in a pseudo wedding ceremony.
HBO
Controversy was a streaming-music windfall this year for musicians at the center of documentaries about their alleged misconduct.
According to a midyear music report from Nielsen, streams of Michael Jackson’s music rose 41% in the first half of the year as HBO released Leaving Neverland, a four-hour documentary with unflinching accounts from two men who allege Jackson sexually assaulted them as young boys for years.
Meanwhile, Ja Rule, who backed the infamous influencer fiasco Fyre Festival, saw streams of his music climb 33% compared with a year earlier. Fyre Festival was the subject of films on Netflix and Hulu in January.
R. Kelly‘s streams rose 13% compared with a year earlier, as the Surviving R. Kelly documentary in January surfaced new testimonials of his alleged predation of young women. Renewed attention last year to the allegations against Kelly also sparked a #MuteRKelly campaign, aimed at encouraging people to protest his music and performances.
The stats put a streaming-era spin on a long-standing contradiction of documentary filmmaking or investigative journalism: the phenomenon that exposing allegations about famous names can inadvertently publicize the people to their benefit.
In decades past, people who wanted to support — or simply satisfy their curiosity about — musicians at the center of a scandal would need to take out their wallet for a download, CD or record. But as streaming has come to dominate how people listen to tunes, music is more accessible to anyone newly curious about an artist embroiled in controversy.