Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi describes how our emotions are affected when people we don’t think we care about leave us. Michael Jackson’s death is one of these situations.

In the period leading up to Michael Jackson’s death, the UK felt largely indifferent towards him and this barely changed even after the announcement of his 100 UK gigs. His death however has had a transformational impact upon consumers’ emotional connection towards him and we are still only at the beginning of the curve.

His PopScore has jumped to an all time high of 30, an increase of 50% from last year and his Purchase Propensity has spiked from 10% to 13%, taking him well above the industry average.

Those who are seemingly most affected by Michael’s death over the last month are 13-19 year old females whose love for him has increased by 9 points to 25% and 20-29 year old females whose love has risen by 7 points to 23%. These scores compare very favourably with averages for artists within these demographics of 9% and 7% respectively.

Amongst the most loved artists with female teens, the only male solo artists in the Top 15 are Michael Jackson (12th) and Justin Timberlake (11th). With females aged 20-29 Michael ranks 8th and Justin 11th.

Not only has the love for Michael increased but the dislike has dropped markedly. The table below shows the negative scores by demographic and the percentage point decline since his death. The most notable reductions are with females 30-39 (20% decline) and females 16-19 (24%).

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Michael Jackson is climbing the list of artists with the greatest consumer propensity to purchase their music. His PopScore rank this month is 36 but he is 10^th in the purchase propensity table, level with U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

His purchase propensity is driven by females aged 13-29 with an average of 20% which is approximately three times the average for this segment. The implication is that if there is more unreleased material, Michael Jackson is likely to dominate the sales charts again for some time, reminiscent of artists like Tupac who released chart-topping hits from the grave.