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At the turn of the millennium, three teen acts were huge in the US, the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and NSYNC. The latter is the only one we haven't study so far. It took 15 years and Adele to break their record of 2,4 million units sold of No Strings Attached in its first week alone.
It wasn't a fluke, as the second fastest selling album of the Soundscan era prior 2015, was also theirs since Celebrity debuted with 1,88 million units sold. Was the teen group led by Justin Timberlake really that big? Was it only in the US where they found success? Or were they a global phenomenon?
NSYNC Original Albums Sales
NSYNC (1997)
- America
- US - 10,900,000
- Canada - 600,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Brazil - N/A
- Mexico - N/A
- Asia - 285,000
- Japan - 75,000
- Oceania
- Australia - N/A
- New Zealand - 5,000
- Europe - 510,000
- UK - 45,000
- France - N/A
- Germany - 300,000
- Italy - N/A
- Spain - N/A
- Sweden - 5,000
- Netherland - 10,000
- Switzerland - 25,000
- Austria - 30,000
- Finland - N/A
- World - 12,490,000
Home for Christmas (1998)
- America
- US - 3,100,000
- Canada - 150,000
- World - 3,300,000
No Strings Attached (2000)
- America
- US - 12,750,000
- Canada - 800,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Brazil - 120,000
- Mexico - 120,000
- Asia - 490,000
- Japan - 150,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 80,000
- New Zealand - 15,000
- Europe - 700,000
- UK - 205,000
- France - 30,000
- Germany - 200,000
- Italy - 30,000
- Spain - N/A
- Sweden - 25,000
- Netherland - 40,000
- Switzerland - 20,000
- Austria - 10,000
- Finland - 10,000
- World - 15,300,000
Celebrity (2001)
- America
- US - 5,825,000
- Canada - 240,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Brazil - 60,000
- Mexico - N/A
- Asia - 315,000
- Japan - 125,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 20,000
- New Zealand - 5,000
- Europe - 260,000
- UK - 115,000
- France - 15,000
- Germany - 50,000
- Italy - 15,000
- Spain - N/A
- Sweden - 5,000
- Netherland - 5,000
- Switzerland - 5,000
- Austria - 5,000
- Finland - N/A
- World - 6,840,000
Original Album Sales - Comments
1997 NSYNC - 12,490,000
1998 Home for Christmas - 3,300,000
2000 No Strings Attached - 15,300,000
2001 Celebrity - 6,840,000
With only three proper studio albums plus one Christmas release, NSYNC sold an insane 37,93 million units. It is almost disappointing when we consider their extraordinary American sales of 32,58 million units with the same records.
Indeed, unlike the Backstreet Boys and Spears, NSYNC never managed to break the global market. They performed alright in countries hugely favorable to teen stars, including Latin America and some Asian areas, but overall their sales abroad have been fairly weak.
Physical Singles Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
The late 90s were still good years for physical single sales, although majors had started to hold out various singles from that format in the US already. This is in part why NSYNC's sales are that irregular as their hits sold either about half a million units or zero in the US, depending on their availability.
The band was quite popular in Germany, Switzerland and Austria (GSA) which provides them with some decent sales there. The 6 singles from their debut album which weren't issued in the US sold nearly 90% of their units in GSA.
In total, they sold 7 million physical singles during their career including the million selling hits I Want You Back and Bye Bye Bye.
NSYNC (1997) - 792,000 equivalent albums
I Want You Back - 1,270,000
Tearin' Up My Heart - 610,000
For the Girl Who Has Everything - 160,000
Here We Go - 180,000
Together Again - 90,000
God Must Have Spent a Little More Time on You - 290,000
Thinking of You (I Drive Myself Crazy) - 40,000
Home for Christmas (1998) - 3,000 equivalent albums
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays - 10,000
No Strings Attached (2000) - 729,000 equivalent albums
Bye Bye Bye - 1,030,000
It's Gonna Be Me - 780,000
This I Promise You - 480,000
I'll Never Stop - 140,000
Celebrity (2001) - 363,000 equivalent albums
Pop - 280,000
Girlfriend - 720,000
Gone - 210,000
Orphan - 207,000 equivalent albums
Music of My Heart - 620,000
U Drive Me Crazy - 70,000
Digital Singles Sales
As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
All things considered, the digital sales of NSYNC aren't that bad. The band obviously existed before the creation of iTunes and their terrible image nowadays should negatively impact their catalog sales.
With that said, their hits are still popular. The leading song is Bye Bye Bye with 1,5 million downloads and ringtones. There are 6 more songs in the 300,000 to 800,000 range, led by Tearin' Up My Heart which now has the edge on I Want You Back among their early singles.
NSYNC (1997) - 108,000 equivalent albums
Tearin' Up My Heart - 770,000
I Want You Back - 420,000
God Must Have Spent a Little More Time on You - 110,000
Thinking of You (I Drive Myself Crazy) - 90,000
Remaining tracks - 100,000
Home for Christmas (1998) - 74,000 equivalent albums
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays - 320,000
Remaining tracks - 170,000
No Strings Attached (2000) - 414,000 equivalent albums
Bye Bye Bye - 1,510,000
It's Gonna Be Me - 590,000
This I Promise You - 510,000
Remaining tracks - 150,000
Celebrity (2001) - 132,000 equivalent albums
Pop - 240,000
Girlfriend - 330,000
Gone - 210,000
Remaining tracks - 100,000
Orphan - 38,000 equivalent albums
All tracks - 255,000
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
Part 1
I would be lying if I told you that NSYNC's albums are streamed heavily, but their hits continue to have legs. If several of their past hits are forgotten like Here We Go, some perform nicely including I Want You Back with 27 million streams on Spotify, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays at 39 million and even higher is Tearin' Up My Heart with 55 million streams on Spotify.
These results provide their debut album with 128,000 equivalent album sales from streams while their Christmas output is on 75,000 units.
Part 2
Massively hyped upon release, No Strings Attached remains strong. Bye Bye Bye registers an impressive 107 million streams on Spotify and 170 million on YouTube. On the former platform, both It's Gonna Be Me and This I Promise You crack 40 million plays. These 3 hits fuel the album to 266,000 equivalent album sales from streams.
At 73,000 sales, the follow up Celebrity is nowhere near as strong. Pop, Girlfriend and Gone are all around 15 million on Spotify, failing to translate their initial success into catalog appeal.
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 Greatest Hits line, those figures mean it sold 680,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 415,000 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 No Strings Attached album are responsible for 58% of the Greatest Hits track list attractiveness. This means it generated 396,000 of its 680,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.
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.
The group enjoyed sizable music video sales thanks to hits from NSYNC and No Strings Attached. Accounting also for sales of some compilations, both albums generated more than 1,2 million units.
BONUS: Total Album (all types) Sales per Country
- America
- US - 33,150,000
- Canada - 1,820,000
- Argentina - N/A
- Brazil - N/A
- Mexico - N/A
- Asia - 1,150,000
- Japan - 375,000
- Oceania
- Australia - 130,000
- New Zealand - 25,000
- Europe - 1,575,000
- UK - 380,000
- France - N/A
- Germany - 595,000
- Italy - N/A
- Spain - N/A
- Sweden - 35,000
- Netherland - 55,000
- Switzerland - 50,000
- Austria - 45,000
- Finland - 15,000
- World - 38,690,000
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.
NSYNC CAREER CSPC RESULTS
So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each album by NSYNC achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!
[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]
The career of NSYNC may have been short lived and massively axed around the US, but their sales are outstanding. They recorded back to back monster albums with their eponymous debut amassing 14,8 million equivalent album sales and its follow up No Strings Attached reaching even higher figures at 17,9 million.
Celebrity started strong but failed to hold as well as its predecessors with a final tally of 7,6 million, which is still solid. Along the way they also released the Holiday album Home For Christmas which sold a cumulative 3,5 million.
This brings the combined total of the group to more than 44 million equivalent album sales over the course of just 4 years. Will Justin Timberlake's personal total be higher? The answer will be published during the next few hours!
The following sections list their most successful songs as well as their records and achievements.
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Chartmasters.org.
Bonuses
BIGGEST TRACKS - Nsync
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. 2000 - Bye Bye Bye [No Strings Attached] - 8,760,000
2. 1997 - Tearin' Up My Heart [NSYNC] - 7,180,000
3. 1996 - I Want You Back [NSYNC] - 4,070,000
4. 2000 - This I Promise You [No Strings Attached] - 3,770,000
5. 2000 - It's Gonna Be Me [No Strings Attached] - 3,680,000
6. 2001 - Pop [Celebrity] - 2,390,000
7. 1998 - Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays [Home for Christmas] - 2,010,000
8. 2001 - Girlfriend [Celebrity] - 1,950,000
9. 2001 - Gone [Celebrity] - 1,690,000
10. 1997 - God Must Have Spent a Little More Time on You [NSYNC] - 1,120,000
If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC NSYNC playlist on Spotify!
Records & Achievements
- At 2,416,000 units sold on its first week in the US as per Soundscan, No Strings Attached remained the fastest selling album ever in this country until the release of Adele's 25 in November 2015.
- At 9,936,000 units sold in 2000 in the US as per Soundscan, No Strings Attached remains the highest selling album ever over a calendar year.
- At 17,909,000 equivalent album sales Worldwide, No Strings Attached is the 5th most successful album from 2000.
We have more for you...
...Justin Timberlake's full CSPC analysis
... checking out the upcoming artists or even voting for them!
... similar artists
... best-selling artists, albums, and singles
I think Justin will have sold less. Maybe:
85 M digital sales
25 M albums
2.5 M streaming
40-43 M
Albums also are records. An album has 12 records, so NSYNC sold more records also.
So this puts NSYNC at less than half the backstreet boys, which totally makes sense. I always felt their music didn't quite compare...it had a cheaper sound and seemed like they were just riding the boy band trend rather than leading it.
I'm wondering about a similar comparison between Take That and Robbie Williams, at the moment. Who would have higher CSPC in your opinion?
Hah. I knew right from the very beginning that Nsync was extremely local. I was right. Their sales was nowhere near Britney nor BSB. Justin did the right move by dating Britney. It gave him the opportunity to introduce himself to the world, and is very useful for the build up of his solo career.
no nsync music is better than backstreet boys. Americans prefer nsync since nsync sold over 1m in its first day and 9.94m in one year breaking the soundscan history.
Backstreet boys first 3 albums has bigger sales than Nsync 3 album sales in the US though, and with a pretty big lead too. So im pretty sure BSB was bigger. I wouldnt say Nsync's music sounds cheaper. Nsync target audience is concentrated a lot more towards teenagers. Among teens Nsync is probably bigger than BSB in the US. But BSB is pretty big among older women too. So their target audience is more diverse. As far Nsync music are cheaper or not, that one is very subjective. At the end of the day, literally all of the singles that came out from BSB, Nsync and Britney Spears are written by the same person, which is Max Martin.
That's only because Backstreet Boys sold more catolog sales. NSA sold 1 million in first day and 9.93 million in 9 months, breaking SoundScan all-time history. Their third album also sold 1.9 million in first week. At their peak, NSYNC has more hard fan obviously.
NSYNC certified 10xP on January 5th,2000. Soundscan sales was 7.7m by the end of 1999 (according to 1998 and 1999 year-end charts),and now it was 8.863m acc to billboard by 2018.That's 1.163m Soundscan sales since the end of 1999. NSYNC was 33th best selling album of the week 2000-01-01,so I think it should still be around 1 million at least Sundscan sales since last certification. Thinking of club sales, My estimation for the album is at least 11,150,000. What do you think, MJD?
This gives their BMG sales, which are already factored in. Where does it says that album sold 14.5 million in the US?
NSYNC's debut certified 10xP on January 5th,2000. Soundscan sales was 7.7m by the end of 1999 (according to 1998 and 1999 year-end charts),and now it was 8.863m acc to billboard by 2018.That’s 1.163m Soundscan sales since the end of 1999. NSYNC was 33th best selling album of the week 2000-01-01,so I think it should still be around 1 million at least Sundscan sales since last certification. I think the total should be at 11.1million. What do you think,MJD?
Hi dhhd,
Shipments and retail sales are different things. The 10 platinum award from January 2000 included all shipments from 1999 Xmas season, which includes a lot of copies sold at retail after the RIAA award. It's possible to add new Soundscan sales to RIAA awards for old releases with few copies left on shelves, but doing so on a Christmas fueled certification at the all-time peak of physical sales can only bring to very flawed results.
Then how do you estimate the 10.9 million figure for NSYNC?And,why do you estimate Britney's third album at 5.2 million while its SoundScan plus BMG sales was under 5 million, but Oops was at 10.44 million combined Soundscan and BMG but you estimated it at only 10.5 million. In The Zone's US sales was estimated at 3.3 million, but soundscan sales was at 3 million, and music club sales was only 5% and I remember it was not on BMG or Columbia.
Haven't u seen his respond on ur Whitney's comment. The Britney album as well as her other albums hasnt been audited for years. Same case as Whitney.
It is not audited at any time. The data is there it just hasnt been updated/published publicly. Artist or record labels need to apply for album sales review before it is released to the public. Since "Nsync" & "Britney" are barely selling anything much lately. I dont think they are in a rush to request for an audit right now as they are barely going to make that much money from royalties.
As per RIAA (US) No strings attached sold 11m, backstreet boys 14m, millenium 13m (as of 2001)..both bsb album surpassed nsync's ..as artists nsync sold 28m, bsb sold 37m
as per nielsen soundscan (north america) for the bestselling albums of all time #6 millenium-12.29m, #12 nsa-11.18m
#23 backstreet boys 10.17m #36 nsync-8.87m
therefore, bsb outsold nsync in the us..
And that’s where you’re wrong!! Nsync was far superior to bsb especially when it came to TALENT but everytime the nsync vs bsb conversation comes up it never seems to be about TALENT....but my thing about you are saying nsync had a “cheaper” sound but then it seems to me you are clearly judging them based on singles nsync and bsb music was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT nsync was wayyy more urban and this is where strong dumb statements like bsb “could sing better” and “music was better” because most of nsync singles were the hype fun dance type tracks then you have bsb who’s singles were more contemporary styled but if you NEVER heard Nsync’s deep cuts..which I’m sure you haven’t (Somewhere,Someday , if only through heavens eyes ,HERE AND NOW, some dreams , something like you,More than a feeling) I can literally name so many songs that I know you never heard! Yet you judge their music like you actually gave them the time of day! Let’s not even get into the fact that Nsync were FAR superior performers to bsb and it shows in their shows you can tell that nsync cared about what they were putting out
Now let’s talk sales and riaa stats
N SYNC
Cert. Units (In Millions): 28
Gold Units: 4
Platinum Units: 4
Multi Platinum Units: 4
Diamond Units: 2
Format: Standard
BACKSTREET BOYS
Cert. Units (In Millions): 37
Gold Units: 5
Platinum Units: 5
Multi Platinum Units: 3
Diamond Units: 2
Format: All types
Mind nsync sales hasn’t been updated in 20 years bsb is still releasing music and has wayyy more albums than nsync and only managed to sale 9 more million than them in 20 years and also Backstreet Boys DOSNT even have a that went #1 on billboard hot 100 like none of these things are talked about tho Nsync haves wayyy more impact than bsb and that’s why they are still being brought up 20 years later.
