It was supposed to be his time. Over a period of two months Justin Timberlake starred in Woody Allen's latest film, released his fifth solo album Man of the Woods plus two singles, and performed at the Superbowl. Too good to be true.

Theaters-wise, Wonder Wheel has been a disaster, the worst results of the director since his title September released 30 years ago. It becomes only more worrying when we know that Allen issues one movie per year on average.

Feedback from his Superbowl performance were chaotic too. His tribute to Prince was seen as fairly insulting considering the opinions of the late singer who clearly stated he hated those post-mortem duets. The audience was also disappointing, the lowest in 9 years.

He is left with his new album. The lead single Filthy debuted at #9 thanks to downloads by his fanbase but it dropped out of the Top 50 after sitting there for only 3 weeks. Abroad it missed the Top 10 almost everywhere including in the UK, Germany and France. Say Something, a duet with Chris Stapleton, was rushed to take over the promotion of the album. While the song debuted at #9 inside the Hot 100, we still have to wait and see how it holds during the upcoming months.

If the start of year is less promising than first hoped, the career of Timberlake has been impressive. With only five albums, spread over 4 eras, he piled up plenty of hits including Cry Me A River, Rock Your Body, SexyBack, My Love, What Comes Around... Goes Around, Summer Love, Suit & Tie, Mirrors and Can't Stop the Feeling!. He also contributed to hits like Where Is The Love?, Signs, Give It to Me, Ayo Technology, 4 Minutes, Dead and Gone, Holy Grail and Love Never Felt So Good. Is that enough to top the total of his former boys band, NSYNC? The group is on 44 million equivalent album sales in total. Another target for Timberlake is to beat his main challengers for the Prince of Pop crown. So far, studies resulted in Ed Sheeran's last update totalling 45,5 million, Justin Bieber's tally of 47 million and Bruno Mars' figure of 47,7 million. Among male acts from the last 25 years, Drake is close to 57 million, Usher is on 59,5 million, Michael Bublé on 62,1 million and, of course, Eminem is way ahead at more than 155 million.

Original Albums Sales

Justified (2002)

• America

  • US - 4,200,000
  • Canada - 325,000
  • Argentina - N/A
  • Brazil - N/A
  • Mexico - N/A

• Asia - 220,000

  • Japan - 80,000

• Oceania

  • Australia - 235,000
  • New Zealand - 35,000

• Europe - 3,270,000

  • UK - 2,010,000
  • France - 190,000
  • Germany - 400,000
  • Italy - 40,000
  • Spain - 10,000
  • Sweden - 35,000
  • Netherland - 100,000
  • Switzerland - 45,000
  • Austria - 25,000
  • Finland - 15,000

• World - 8,550,000

FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006)

• America

  • US - 4,800,000
  • Canada - 560,000
  • Argentina - 25,000
  • Brazil - 75,000
  • Mexico - N/A

• Asia - 250,000

  • Japan - 130,000

• Oceania

  • Australia - 435,000
  • New Zealand - 55,000

• Europe - 2,930,000

  • UK - 1,185,000
  • France - 310,000
  • Germany - 450,000
  • Italy - 130,000
  • Spain - 10,000
  • Sweden - 75,000
  • Netherland - 65,000
  • Switzerland - 80,000
  • Austria - 25,000
  • Finland - 20,000

• World - 9,340,000

The 20/20 Experience (2013)

• America

  • US - 2,625,000
  • Canada - 160,000
  • Argentina - N/A
  • Brazil - 25,000
  • Mexico - N/A

• Asia - 95,000

  • Japan - 55,000

• Oceania

  • Australia - 60,000
  • New Zealand - 10,000

• Europe - 750,000

  • UK - 365,000
  • France - 50,000
  • Germany - 140,000
  • Italy - 15,000
  • Spain - 10,000
  • Sweden - 5,000
  • Netherland - 20,000
  • Switzerland - 20,000
  • Austria - 7,500
  • Finland - 5,000

• World - 3,800,000

The 20/20 Experience - 2 of 2 (2013)

• America

  • US - 1,025,000
  • Canada - 75,000
  • Argentina - N/A
  • Brazil - 20,000
  • Mexico - N/A

• Asia - 40,000

  • Japan - 25,000

• Oceania

  • Australia - 25,000
  • New Zealand - 4,000

• Europe - 180,000

  • UK - 90,000
  • France - 10,000
  • Germany - 30,000
  • Italy - 5,000
  • Spain - 3,000
  • Sweden - 2,000
  • Netherland - 7,000
  • Switzerland - 5,000
  • Austria - 2,000
  • Finland - 1,000

• World - 1,400,000

Original Album Sales - Comments

Although neither Justified and FutureSex/LoveSounds topped 10 million pure album sales in spite of the various claims arguing such, they were still two tremendously successful releases with 8,55 million and 9,34 million sales respectively.

They represent the largest part of the 23,49 million sales total of these five albums. Issued as twin brothers seperated by some months, the success wasn't the same for both volumes of The 20/20 Experience. The first one was a solid success at 3,8 million while the second one failed to maintain the pace with 1,4 million. It sold a few more copies through a package merging together both volumes, but this set will be listed inside the compilations category instead.

Obviously, Man of the Woods hasn't sold 400,000 units so far. This figure refers to the estimated number of units shipped at the moment. This is the minimum amount that it may sell. Time will tell how much higher it can reach.

2002 Justified - 8,550,000
2006 FutureSex/LoveSounds - 9,340,000
2013 The 20/20 Experience - 3,800,000
2013 The 20/20 Experience - 2 of 2 - 1,400,000
2018 Man of the Woods - 400,000

Physical Singles Sales

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.

With no mass physical single released in the US, sales of Timberlake in this format can't be too high. They are strong for an artist who debuted as late as in 2002 though. All 3 main singles from his first album sold over 300,000 units each, all with more than 100,000 in the UK. SexyBack sold half a million units, even if the market had already moved into downloads by then.  The biggest seller of his career remains the song by the Black Eyed Peas on which he is uncredited, Where is the Love? at 1,49 million. He sold a very respectable 5,3 million physical singles combined.

Justified (2002) - 420,000 equivalent albums

Señorita - 130,000
Like I Love You - 450,000
Cry Me a River - 490,000
Rock Your Body - 330,000

FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006) - 311,000 equivalent albums

SexyBack - 500,000
My Love - 260,000
LoveStoned / I Think She Knows (Interlude) - 60,000
What Goes Around... / ...Comes Around (Interlude) - 200,000
Summer Love / Set the Mood (Prelude) - 10,000
Until the End of Time - 5,000

The 20/20 Experience (2013) - 3,000 equivalent albums

All Singles - 10,000

The 20/20 Experience - 2 of 2 (2013) - 1,000 equivalent albums

All Singles - 3,000

Man of the Woods (2018) - 0 equivalent albums

All Singles - 0

Orphan - 864,000 equivalent albums

Work It - 130,000
Where is the Love? - 1,490,000
I'm Lovin' It - 20,000
Signs - 380,000
Give It to Me - 220,000
Ayo Technology - 160,000
4 Minutes - 330,000
Dead and Gone - 70,000
Love Sex Magic - 50,000
Carry Out - 10,000
Remaining Singles - 20,000

Digital Singles Sales

As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.

Each era of Timberlake had a completely different context. Justified came out a couple of years before the creation of iTunes. The format needed a few years to grow, meaning all units achieved by hits like Cry Me A River and Rock Your Body happened when they were already catalog titles. With this in mind, the 8 million units sold by songs from this album are impressive.

FutureSex/LoveSounds was released and promoted while downloads and ringtones were booming. SexyBack is the best illustration of this situation as the song sold 4,9 million downloads and 3,6 million ringtones in the US alone. Its global total is at 11,3 million units. My Love and What Goes Around...Comes Around were big hits too with more than 5 million copies sold a piece. LoveStoned and Summer Love are both 2 million sellers while Until the End of Time ends on 1,5 million, with more than half of its sales coming via ringtones. This string of big hits push the total of digital sales for this era to a massive 29 million.

By the release of The 20/20 Experience, ringtones were dead but streaming was only just getting started. Both Mirrors and Suit & Tie were huge at 11,4 million combined, but when the promotion switched to the volume 2, results were no where near as good, although Not a Bad Thing sold 2 million units.

Man of the Woods comes out in a streaming world when downloads have been seriously damaged with the market down more than 50% during the last 4 years. Its singles are also recent with very modest sales up to date.

Aside from all album eras, Timberlake participated in several smashes. He sold more than 6 million units with his 2016 massive seller Can't Stop the Feeling from the Soundtrack Trolls. The T.I. song Dead and Gone also sold well with sales surpassing 6 million. As many as 8 other collaborations, including titles with Madonna and Michael Jackson, sold in the 3 to 5 million range.

Combining all his songs, Timberlake cracks the 9-digits mark with some 102 million digital sales without involving streams.

Justified (2002) - 1,215,000 equivalent albums

Señorita - 1,130,000
Like I Love You - 730,000
Cry Me a River - 2,780,000
Rock Your Body - 3,260,000
Remaining tracks - 200,000

FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006) - 4,350,000 equivalent albums

SexyBack - 11,310,000
My Love - 5,740,000
LoveStoned / I Think She Knows (Interlude) - 2,100,000
What Goes Around... / ...Comes Around (Interlude) - 5,260,000
Summer Love / Set the Mood (Prelude) - 2,460,000
Until the End of Time - 1,530,000
Remaining tracks - 600,000

The 20/20 Experience (2013) - 1,829,000 equivalent albums

Suit & Tie - 4,850,000
Mirrors - 6,540,000
Remaining tracks - 800,000

The 20/20 Experience - 2 of 2 (2013) - 668,000 equivalent albums

TKO - 800,000
Take Back the Night - 670,000
Drink You Away - 710,000
Not a Bad Thing / Pair of Wings - 1,970,000
Remaining tracks - 300,000

Man of the Woods (2018) - 71,000 equivalent albums

Filthy - 210,000
Say Something - 210,000
Remaining tracks - 50,000

Orphan - 7,181,000 equivalent albums

Where is the Love? - 4,530,000
Signs - 950,000
Give It to Me - 3,600,000
Ayo Technology - 3,150,000
Rehab - 2,320,000
4 Minutes - 5,150,000
Dead and Gone - 6,700,000
Love Sex Magic - 2,050,000
Carry Out - 3,100,000
Holy Grail - 4,510,000
Love Never Felt So Good - 3,470,000
Can't Stop the Feeling - 6,440,000
Remaining tracks - 1,900,000

Streaming Sales

Streaming is made up of two families - audio and video. Our CSPC methodology now includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube. As detailed in the Fixing Log article, Spotify represents 132 million of the 212 million users of streaming platforms, while YouTube is pretty much the only video platform generating some revenue for the industry. Below is the equivalence set on the aforementioned article:

Audio Stream - 1500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream - 11,750 views equal 1 album unit

Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = 212/132 * Spotify streams / 1500 + YouTube views / 11750

Streaming Part 1

Streaming started well after the release of Justified and even FutureSex / LoveSounds but the appeal of their hits remains strong. They both include a pair of songs at more than 100 million streams on Spotify, all of which also top this total on YouTube. SexyBack is the biggest of them with more than 200 million on both sides, followed by Cry Me A River at 165 million.

The consistency of the latter album impresses. All the songs from the original tracklists are on 7 million or more while all the songs from Justified are at least up to 2 million. These great showings conclude on 490,000 equivalent album sales for the 2002 effort, while the 2006 blockbuster hits 676,000 units.

Streaming Part 2

Suit & Tie hasn't maintained its initial popularity. The track has 112 million streams on Spotify, which is great, but we need to point out that it is already topped by the likes Rock Your Body. This is a striking result given streaming had started to gain ground by 2013 and Suit & Tie was able to accumulate streams from day 1 of release. Elsewhere Mirrors continues to be a powerful song with 330 million streams on Spotify and twice as many on YouTube. Most songs from the album are on 15-20 million too, greatly helping the overall total of The 20/20 Experience, which stands at 740,000 equivalent album sales.

Once again Volume 2 fails to reproduce the numbers of its immediate predecessor. Not A Bad Thing is still strong at 128 million streams on Spotify and the track list overall is solid at 401,000 units.

Man of the Woods is too recent to come to a conclusion, at least it adds already more than 100,000 sales to its personal counts.

Streaming Part 3

There are a lot of hits in this list of Orphan songs, but all eyes get caught by the massive figure of Can't Stop the Feeling. With 775 million streams on Spotify, and over 1,1 billion on YouTube, it shows Timberlake is fully able to attract the public using streaming platforms. The combined total of all these songs is well over 2 million equivalent album sales.

Full Length related record Sales

It sounds fairly logical to add together weighted sales of one era - studio album, physical singles, downloads, streams - to get the full picture of an album's popularity. For older releases though, they also generate sales of various live, music videos and compilation albums.

All those packaging-only records do not create value, they exploit the value originating from the parent studio album of each of its tracks instead. Inevitably, when such compilations are issued, this downgrades catalog sales of the original LP. Thus, to perfectly gauge the worth of these releases, we need to re-assign sales proportionally to its contribution of all the compilations which feature its songs. The following table explains this method.

How to understand this table? If you check for example the Justified The Videos line, those figures mean it sold 175,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 457,000 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part on the right of the table shows how many equivalent streams are coming from each original album, plus the share it represents on the overall package. Thus, streaming figures tell us songs from the Justified album are (logically) responsible for  100% of the Justified The Videos track list attractiveness. This means it generated all its 175,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.

Please note the 285,000 selling box containing both volumes of The 20/20 Experience.

Full Length related records Sales – Summary

Here is the most underestimated indicator of an album’s success – the amount of compilation sales of all kinds it generated. Due to the dependency of sales of the original studio albums on these releases, they are a key piece of the jigsaw.

BONUS: Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

• America

  • US - 12,800,000
  • Canada - 1,135,000
  • Argentina - N/A
  • Brazil - N/A
  • Mexico - N/A

• Asia - 610,000

  • Japan - 295,000

• Oceania

  • Australia - 765,000
  • New Zealand - 105,000

• Europe - 7,220,000

  • UK - 3,695,000
  • France - 565,000
  • Germany - 1,035,000
  • Italy - 190,000
  • Spain - 35,000
  • Sweden - 115,000
  • Netherland - 195,000
  • Switzerland - 150,000
  • Austria - 60,000
  • Finland - 40,000

• World - 23,370,000

Please note that some of the countries totals may be slightly incomplete when the figure is N/A for minor releases. Countries with too much missing information to be precise enough are listed as N/A.

Justin Timberlake Career CSPC Results

So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by Justin Timberlake achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!

[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]

It isn't easy to move from a boy band to a solo career. Robbie Williams did it successfully, but then the Backstreet Boys members bombed and former One Direction stars are still struggling so far to be big by themselves. Timberlake managed the trick from the very first try with his successful debut Justified. It wasn't a blockbuster, nor did it create a mania around him, but the album definitely gained him status as a true pop star with 11,2 million equivalent album sales to date.

FutureSex / LoveSounds raised the bar even higher. With slightly over 15 million units sold cumulatively, the era was huge for the singer. The 20 / 20 Experience had mixed fortunes, but that's still more than 9 million sales mostly over the course of one single year.

Man of the Woods is off to a slow start. The competition is low at the moment though so it still has plenty of time to turn things around.

Apart from his albums, the various orphan hits add for a stunning 10,2 million CSPC units, led by his recent song Can't Stop the Feeling at 1,9 million equivalent album sales.

Sales of all his solo records amount for a combined 46,47 million units. This tops his 44,03 million units from his NSYNC days. It also tops Ed Sheeran, but not for long, while this puts him below Justin Bieber and Bruno Mars who started many years after him but have been more prolific.

The following sections list his most successful songs as well as his records and achievements.

As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Chartmasters.org.

BIGGEST TRACKS - Justin Timberlake

The list of most successful songs is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each of them. It includes the song's own physical singles sales with a 0,3 weighting, its download and streaming sales, and with appropriate weighting too, plus its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

1. 2006 - SexyBack [FutureSex/LoveSounds] - 5,450,000
2. 2002 - Cry Me a River [Justified] - 4,540,000
3. 2013 - Mirrors [The 20/20 Experience] - 3,650,000
4. 2002 - Rock Your Body [Justified] - 3,370,000
5. 2006 - What Goes Around... / ...Comes Around (Interlude) [FutureSex/LoveSounds] - 3,110,000
6. 2006 - My Love [FutureSex/LoveSounds] - 2,550,000
7. 2016 - Can't Stop the Feeling [Orphan] - 1,900,000
8. 2002 - Señorita [Justified] - 1,650,000
9. 2013 - Suit & Tie [The 20/20 Experience] - 1,630,000
10. 2003 - Where is the Love? [Orphan] - 1,350,000
11. 2009 - Dead and Gone [Orphan] - 1,120,000
12. 2002 - Like I Love You [Justified] - 1,050,000
12. 2006 - Summer Love / Set the Mood (Prelude) [FutureSex/LoveSounds] - 1,050,000
14. 2006 - LoveStoned / I Think She Knows (Interlude) [FutureSex/LoveSounds] - 1,000,000
15. 2008 - 4 Minutes [Orphan] - 950,000

Records & Achievements

• Justin Timberlake is the only artist who registered the annual best selling album in the US as per Soundscan both as per of a group and solo. No Strings Attached was the top seller of 2000 with 9,9 million sales while The 20/20 Experience led 2013 with 2,4 million units.
• At 2,490,000 US sales, Can't Stop the Feeling! was the highest selling single of 2016 in this country.
• At 4, Justin Timberlake was the second male artist with the most US Hot 100 #1 hits during the 00s.
• At 5,450,000 equivalent album sales, SexyBack is the most successful song from 2006.
• At 15,014,000 equivalent album sales, FutureSex / LoveSounds is second most successful album from 2006.

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