So what was the result of this challenge? Any final update?
Yes!
So, Thriller the album reached #19 on the Billboard 200 which was pretty huge. The highest it's been this century! So that was exciting.
Unfortunately, however, the Thriller Challenge for the song wasn't as successful. It landed at #24 on the Hot 100. While this is really exciting for a 40 year old song, it was disappointing because last year it reached #19 without this effort. However, some context I've learned since then is that last year Thriller was trending on TikTok leading up to Halloween, which lead to it appearing in more playlists and reaching the general public more broadly.
Interestingly, the numbers for streaming, sales, and radio play were all up this year from last year, but chart placement was not as strong. The main factor for this is presumably Taylor Swift releasing her album, as well as several other big releases (including Rhianna's first single in 6 years) and a number of other big artists. Also, I'm not sure how much this impacted Thriller's numbers, but there was strangely a change in how radio play was evaluated in the overall ranking mid-week during the Thriller Challenge. Very strange and unexpected. Again, I'm not sure if this helped or hurt Thriller, but it is notable.
So in all, the Thriller Challenge didn't reach the height the organizers hoped for, but it did do pretty well all things considered! I was personally hoping for a top 10, but hey. There's always next year!