In general, people in the USA never cared about Michael or any other particular entertainer. Since 1980 there's been over 200 million people in the states and even more today. The biggest selling albums here are either Thriller or The Eagles Greatest Hits 1 and they're currently around 29 million. Those albums probably don't have that much overlap in people owning both. There's too many different kinds of people for there to be a collective taste for the majority of them. Even if you determine what's popular by the mainstream, that really means what is popular with white people. With movies, very few with a cast that is primarily non-white become blockbusters. They're labeled "black movies" or "Chinese movies". Most people don't pay attention to whatever is popular on the radio or the Billboard charts. Garth Brooks was also a big seller here and he probably isn't selling to a lot of same people who bought Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd or To The Extreme by Vanilla Ice or Metallica albums. Progressive rock, goth music, & heavy metal sell mainly to certain audiences. There's acts who are really popular with certain ethnicities like Selena, Vicente Fernandez, or Juan Luis Guerra. There's a whole separate Latin Grammy show. There's genres more popular in certain areas of the US like zydeco, heartland rock, and Miami Bass. There's been popular acts who had little media and radio attention like the Grateful Dead. They were more popular with concerts than records. Grateful Dead only had 1 Top 40 radio hit and it came in the mid 1980s, when the group originated in the 1960s. BB King became a millionaire performing blues and known in many countries. Blues has never had much Top 40 airplay. Blues influenced acts like Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton got the big sales and airplay.