Breaking barriers is going from a 90% black crowd on concerts to a 50/50 ratio and eventually an overwhelmingly white crowd. What other black artist managed to do this?
Michael achieved this because he believed in it. None of his contempororaties or influences managed the same.
Because Mike & Lionel Richie adapted their music to appeal to the mainstream audience. He did duets with Paul McCartney & Mick Jagger, not Teddy Pendergrass or Johnnie Taylor. He (or Quincy) got Eddie Van Halen, not Ernie Isley. R&B as a genre never really crossed over like hip hop has done today. Commodores started out as a funk band, but later became really popular with the mainstream Top 40 audience with Lionel Richie ballads like
Three Times A Lady. There's a difference in Tina Turner's solo music and the music she had done with Ike. If she continued in the 1980s with Ike's sound, her big comeback probably wouldn't have happened. Clive Davis didn't want Whitney Houston to be a R&B only artist and found her songs that were less R&B and a clean cut image to match. That's why people were surprised she married Bobby Brown, who had the opposite image. Some Black artists wasn't willing to change their music to get the white audience.
The main reason that some Black artists wanted the white audience, was because they could get bigger sales & the media attention that came with that. Also major record labels spent more money on mainstream artists than R&B artists. So still basically racism. CBS had to threaten MTV with removing all of their acts to show the
Billie Jean video. Which included really popular artists like Journey, Billy Joel, Culture Club, & Bruce Springsteen. Also, there were a lot of Black artists who didn't do R&B. Until recent years, Charley Pride was the only Black artist who had a successful career in country music. He wasn't the only one to try it. MTV claimed they didn't show Black artists because their music (R&B) didn't fit their rock format. Yet showed Hall & Oates who were basically doing the same thing. They were even labeled "blue eyed soul". There were Black rock bands like Fishbone & The Bus Boys that MTV didn't show either. In the 1980s, the R&B chart in Billboard magazine was called "Black Singles" & "Black Albums".
Mike getting a largely white audience, did not really help other Black artists escape the R&B radio "ghetto". So what did he really change? He got the benefit. A few token artists getting to crossover, did nothing for the big picture. Rick James still couldn't get on MTV, and this was after Mike, Lionel Richie, Billy Ocean, & Prince got on there. Rick's music was still too R&B to get Top 40 airplay. That's why he's just a "one hit wonder" with pop audiences, but had many R&B hits. Whitney Houston was mainstream big, not Stephanie Mills or Phillys Hyman.
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That wasn't the case decades ago. Music is more segregated now than it's ever been.
