When everyone though streaming was going to end the career of teen singers like Justin Bieber, the Canadian superstar crushed records in this format thanks to 2015's Purpose.

After returning with back to back efforts Changes and Justice, he dropped one more single with Honest this week. We review his outstanding results up to date.

At the mere age of 15, Canadian superstar Justin Bieber instantly became a pop phenomenon following the release of his debut EP, My World. The record was later extended into the even more successful My World 2.0.

While the original EP spawned recognizable songs such as One Time and One Less Lonely Girl, the star scored his first major smash hit with Baby, which was a viral phenomenon and at one point the most-viewed video on YouTube.

In early 2011 while My Worlds 2.0 was still smashing, the star released a concert film centered around his life.

Its accompanying soundtrack which also served as a remix album debuted at #1, giving Bieber his second number one album within 10 months.

Just a few months later, the Canadian teen idol milked his fan base even further with the release of the highly successful Christmas album Under the Mistletoe.

It debuted straight to #1 in the US and his native Canada, consolidating his impressive resume.

The singer wasn't planning on slowing down, as roughly seven months later he dropped his fifth project in two years, this time a standard studio album, Believe.

As it was to be expected from the pop phenomenon, Believe was highly successful and debuted straight at #1 on top of spawning his highest-peaking song at the time, Boyfriend.

Additionally, the album spawned two other Top 10 hits, As Long As You Love Me and Beauty and a Beat.

The years 2013-2014 were more a bit more difficult for Bieber, as he faced some personal issues and Journals was a struggle in comparison to his previous work.

In 2015, the star managed to come back bigger than ever, proving to be more than just a teen pop fad.

His fourth studio album, Purpose, spawned three consecutive #1 hits in the US, the 1-2-3 punch of What Do You Mean?, Sorry and Love Yourself.

In 2017, he was part of one of the longest running #1s of all time, Despacito.

He also contributed in smashes like Cold Water, Let Me Love You, I'm The One and I Don't Care.

After a moderately successful era with Changes, Justice made him a chart master once more. How high are his combined sales so far?

As usual, I'll be using the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept in order to relevantly gauge his results. This concept will not only bring you sales information for all Justin Bieber' albums, physical and download singles, as well as audio and video streaming. In fact, it will also determine their true popularity.

If you are not yet familiar with the CSPC method, below is a nice and short video of explanations. I fully recommend watching it before getting into the sales figures. Of course, if you are a regular visitor feel free to skip the video and get into the numbers directly.

UPDATE DATES:
- Sales (albums, singles): 2022/05/03
- Streaming (audio, video): 2022/04/28

The Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept (CSPC)

There are two ways to understand this revolutionary concept. In the first place, there is this Scribe video posted below. If you are unaware of the CSPC method, you will get the full idea within just a pair of minutes.

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If you are a mathematical person, and want to know the full method as well as formulas, you can read the full introduction article.

Now let's get into the artist's sales figures in detail in order to apply this concept and define the act's true popularity!

Justin Bieber Album Sales

Original Album Sales - Comments

NB: Chinese downloads of Changes and Justice are listed in the compilations section.

At 9.38 million sales, My Worlds was a tremendous start for the Canadian superstar.

While we have to keep in mind this is essentially the sales of two different releases, not many albums were pulling similar numbers by the end of the 2000s.

Under the Mistletoe looks like a steep decline in comparison but performs quite well for a Christmas album, as it was the 7th best-selling album of 2011 according to the IFPI.

The pop star's third studio album, Believe, scores similar numbers to Under the Mistletoe, selling 3.18 million to date.

By 2015, streaming had already pretty much taken over the industry, but this did not stop Bieber from selling a massive 4.74 million pure copies of Purpose.

This marks a healthy increase of 49% over his previous effort.

By 2020, the background was again different, with pure sales limited to bundles or collector items.

The hyped release of Changes failed to translate into large sales, with total units to date standing at 380,000. Justice faced the same environment, moving 280,000 copies.

With six studio albums to his name, Justin Bieber is up to over 20.7 million albums sold - this figure does not consider other releases, such as Never Say Never: The Remixes, My Worlds Acoustic, and Believe Acoustic.

All his pre-streaming releases sold 2.5 million or more thanks to the strong fan base of the singer, as we will see under the appropriate section later on this article.

Justin Bieber Songs Sales

Below, we list down results from the artist through physical sales, digital sales and streaming.

Please be aware that when the artist is regarded as the lead act, he is rewarded with 100% of these units, while featured acts share among them a 50% piece of the totals.

Physical Singles

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

I’m sure you have started to be familiar with the evolution of the physical market of singles!

The market was dead every nation but in Japan and GSA countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria) by the time Bieber made it big in 2010.

International stars sold virtually no physical singles in Japan so it is all down to Germany which remained somewhat relevant there with 4,3 million CDs sold in 2010.

To give you a rough idea, that’s a market good enough to hit 100,000 with one of the biggest hits of the year, 50,000 units with a #1 single, 20,000 units for a solid Top 5 smash and 10,000 units for most tracks that made the Top 10 various weeks.

That being said, All I Want Is You notably moved all of its 20,000 units in mainland China while What Do You Mean? did 30,000 in Norway.

In these markets such numbers are somewhat unheard of.

Thanks to the singer's strong fan base, Bieber has sold a total of 727,000 physical singles to date.

This includes sales of recent singles like Yummy, Holy, Lonely, Anyone, Stuck With U and Monster which benefited from the current trend of collectors sold from singers' webstores for a limited time.

Digital songs

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

Just like the profile of Bieber is not standard in the music industry, his digital sales are atypical.

Of course, he’s got some large hits including Baby, Boyfriend or Beauty And A Beat but none of them were truly best sellers.

His top 3 sellers up to 2015 add for 21 million, an average of slightly more than 7 million while artists like Eminem, Rihanna or Bruno Mars all have multiple 10+ million selling singles.

In fact, the power of Bieber‘s catalog isn’t limited to a restricted number of songs. What strikes the most with his digital sales pattern is how consistent his songs are, album tracks included.

His non-singles songs sold millions, amassing a huge total between them.

The best illustration of this situation is likely the Swiss market which is very meaningful as it combines influences from Germany, France and Italy. In that country, up to 2015, the singer never made the Top 15 as a leading act.

Still, he charted 21 different songs, adding for a large number of sales despite never breaking into the Top 10.

This is how, despite never breaking records with a unique song, and by releasing only three proper albums during the downloads era, he is up to an impressive total of over 113.5 million digital singles sold.

If we look at albums specific figures, top songs from the Purpose album moved from 4.5 to 7.5 million a piece, while these figures do not seem very impressive it must be said that digital sales went downhill in the last years with streaming taking over.

Thus, these hits are arguably the biggest ones of Bieber’s career along with Baby.

I Don't Care also did wonders, shifting nearly a million units, without Chinese downloads which are listed later on.

This is also the case for Hold On and Anyone which moved over 700,000 units combined in China.

Songs from Changes and Justice obviously suffer from the market collapse but they are no big smash hits either. The largest seller, Intentions, moved only 310,000 copies.

The singer also contributed to some of the biggest hits in recent years, but again the growing market share of streaming limited their sales impact. These include smashes like Let Me Love You, Cold Water, Despacito and I'm The One.

Streaming

Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube.

To factor in the growing impact of multiple Asian countries where these platforms aren't always the go-to site for music streaming, more sources have been added.

In order to account for their real popularity in each relevant country, the below sources have been used along with the mentioned ratios that reflect the market share of each area.

Audio Streams
– South Korea: Genie streams * 2.20 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan: AWA streams * 68 / 4 (AWA has 4% of the Japanese streaming market, and 32% are already considered through Spotify’s extrapolation)
– Arabic world: Anghami streams
– Sub-Saharan Africa: Boomplay + Audiomack streams
– Elsewhere: Spotify streams * 649 / 406 (649 million subscribers of global platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, etc. against 406 million from Spotify itself) + Genie streams * 2.20 (uses Genie rather than Spotify to extrapolate markets like Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam)

Video Streams
– China* : QQ video streams * 50 if the song is available for audio stream, QQ video streams * 5 elseway (scale built based on known figures for several major artists)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views increased by 10% to account for various local platforms

*since Chinese streaming platforms are mostly video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted on par with YouTube streams.

Audio Stream value – 1,500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream value – 6,750 views equal 1 album unit

Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * 649/406 + Genie * 2.20 * 2 + AWA * 68 / 4 + Anghami + Boomplay + Audiomack ) / 1500 + ( QQ views* 50(or 5) + YouTube * 1.1 ) / 6750

Top Hits

The 1-2-3 punch of the Purpose singles becomes even more obvious here, as the first three singles of this record are responsible for an enormous total of 7.7 million EAS.

One of the many monsters in this format is DJ Snake's Let Me Love You at 1.78 billion streams on Spotify and 3 billion views on YouTube for a total of 2.52 million EAS.

Interestingly, last time we reviewed his career, every single song inside Bieber's personal Top 10 but I Don't Care were released between 2015 and 2017.

Now, both Stay, Peaches and Intentions have joined the party, on top of Baby which climbs thanks to the new YouTube weighting. The former will soon break the virtual tie among the singers' top 4 most streamed tracks on Spotify, all at 1.765 billion +/- 25k.

As for Peaches, revived his career one more time after the somewhat disappointing Changes era. Speaking about this one, Intentions ended up becoming fairly big on its own, soon to become Bieber's 12 track to hit a billion streams on Spotify, an all-time record.

The list includes other orphan songs and features such as Luis Fonsi's Despacito and Major Lazer's Cold Water, which pull 991,000 EAS and 445,000 million EAS each in spite of being valued less due to their feature status.

DJ Khaled's I'm The One fails to hit the top 40 because of that, as Bieber is rewarded with only 12.5% of its units, since he is one out of 4 featured artists.

It's worth noting that 6 tracks from Justice make the top 30 against only 2 from Changes inside the top 40.

It confirms that low pure sales from these albums do not only reflect the market conditions, but also that Changes had nowhere near the impact of the biggest albums.

Most of the star's pre 2015 hits register similar numbers between each other - even songs that were not even remotely close in terms of initial success.

On Spotify, the three Top 10 hits from Believe range from 373 million to 412 million, with As Long As You Love Me being the most streamed track.

Being released before the streaming era, Baby displays a rather low 493 million streams on Spotify but a massive 3.06 billion views on YouTube, which is enough for over 1.27 million EAS - a very healthy number for a song released over a decade ago.

In total, YouTube views are on their way to hit the insane milestone of 50 billion views. Sorry leads the way at 4.5 billion.

Album-wise, Purpose is an absolute monster with over 12.2 million EAS from streams.

Full catalog breakdown

If you are familiar with the artist's catalog and want to check details of each and every song, you can access to all of them right here.

Keep yourself up to date

Our website provides you a fantastic tool which fetchs updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!

Justin Bieber compilations 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.

The distribution process

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.

How to understand this table? In the example of Never Say Never: The Remixes, these figures mean it sold 1,450,000 units worldwide. The second statistics column means all versions of all the songs included on this package add for 1,062,714 equivalent album sales from streams of all types.

The second part on the 1,344,867 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 My Words album are responsible for 61% of the Never Say Never: The Remixes track list attractiveness. This means it generated 886,000 of its 1,450,000 album sales and so forth for the other records.

Compilations sales figures listing

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. 

These numbers are obtained by applying the method from the section The distribution process to all packages listed under Compilation sales figures listing category.

Here we can see the madness created by My Worlds, which fueled tons of sales from live sets, remixes and music videos. They add for over 4 million sales.

The acoustic version of Believe also did wonders, while both Changes and Justice enjoyed heavy Chinese downloads.

Ironically, Purpose, which is full of hits, hasn't been exploited outside of the main album product.

Total Album (all types) Sales per Country

Please note country-specific numbers may miss sales of a few minor releases, although totals are complete.

Justin Bieber Career CSPC Results

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

Albums CSPC results

[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]

And there we have it! My Worlds, alongside its many different releases which included an EP, a live set, a remix album and a DVD / Blu Ray release, has now joined the 20 million club, standing at 22.07 million an climbing.

This album is part of a very limited list of late 2000s/2010s releases that have reached this plateau.

Another one that made it to this level is no other than Purpose which is up to a massive 20.5 million EAS, making it the second biggest album of 2015 only behind Adele's 25.

Under the Mistletoe continues to grow and is poised to do so again with the Christmas season approaching, it moved 4.82 million EAS to date.

Often labeled as a flop upon release, Believe is now up to 10.38 million EAS, effectively crossing the 10 million mark!

Without a doubt that's enough to end up as one of the biggest albums of the entire 2010s decade, alongside blockbusters such as Taylor Swift's 1989 and Eminem's Recovery.

Changes is struggling to climb really high. At 4.29 million this is far from being a low seller, but by Bieber's standards it can legitimately be regarded as a disappointment.

It doesn't seem to be that big of an issue for the artist who's able to rebound with top 10 global hits with ease as shown with Stuck With U, Holy, Lonely, Peaches and Stay.

The whole Justice era was actually very solid, with already 7.33 million total sales. In the long run, it is likely to become another 10-million seller for the Canadian superstar.

On top of strong albums, the artist is also very successful with orphan songs and features, these include true juggernauts in the digital field.

In fact, they are so strong that even without album sales to account for they still break the 22 million overall figure, and that's considering the decrease of features' worth.

The career total of over 91.85 million equivalent albums makes Justin Bieber one of the youngest artists ever to reach such numbers.

Singles CSPC results

The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats.

Instead, it includes weighted sales of the song's physical single, download, ringtone and streaming as well as its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.

1. 2010 - Justin Bieber ft. Ludacris - Baby [My Worlds] - 7,300,000
2. 2015 - Justin Bieber - Love Yourself [Purpose] - 4,870,000
3. 2015 - Justin Bieber - Sorry [Purpose] - 4,700,000
4. 2015 - Justin Bieber - What Do You Mean? [Purpose] - 3,780,000
5. 2016 - DJ Snake ft. Justin Bieber - Let Me Love You [Features] - 2,940,000
6. 2012 - Justin Bieber - Boyfriend [Believe] - 2,620,000
7. 2021 - The Kid Laroi & Justin Bieber - Stay [Orphan] - 2,580,000
8. 2012 - Justin Bieber ft. Nicki Minaj - Beauty And A Beat [Believe] - 2,470,000
9. 2011 - Justin Bieber - Mistletoe [Under The Mistletoe] - 2,450,000
10. 2010 - Sean Kingston & Justin Bieber - Eenie Meenie [My Worlds] - 2,400,000
11. 2015 - Justin Bieber - Where Are Ü Now [Purpose] - 2,390,000
12. 2012 - Justin Bieber ft. Big Sean- As Long As You Love Me [Believe] - 2,350,000
13. 2019 - Ed Sheeran & Justin Bieber - I Don't Care [Orphan] - 2,210,000
14. 2009 - Justin Bieber - One Time [My Worlds] - 2,160,000

If you feel inspired by this list, we just created this CSPC Justin Bieber playlist on Spotify!

https://open.spotify.com/user/tony7100088/playlist/1bX2LT2k0NEdMMb1au9Lji

Discography results

Thanks to our new ASR (Artist Success Rating) concept, we know that his sales represent 18.38 million times the purchase of his entire discography. Coupled with his total sales, it translates into an ASR score of 233.

It is similar to the score of artists like Linkin Park, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna. The ranking of all artists studied so far is available too at this link.

Records & Achievements

• At 91,877,000 equivalent album sales, Justin Bieber is the highest selling artist born in 1990 or later.
• At 22,070,000 equivalent album sales, My Worlds is the most successful album from 2009.
• At 20,536,000 equivalent album sales, Purpose is the 2nd most successful album from 2015.
• At 11, Justin Bieber has the second most songs over 1 billion streams on Spotify.
• In 2016, Justin Bieber became the first artist ever to reach 10 billion views on Vevo.
• At 12,218,000 equivalent album sales, Purpose is the second biggest streaming album ever.
• At 16 weeks, Despacito is the second longest running #1 single of all-time of the US Hot 100.
• Justin Bieber is the only artist ever to replace itself at #1 of the US Hot 100 two times with entirely different songs.
• In December, 5, 2015, Justin Bieber broke the record for most simultaneous entries inside the US Hot 100 with 17 songs, 3 of which were Top 10.
• At 12xPlatinum, Baby is one of the highest certified single of all-time in the US.
• At 38 weeks, Justin Bieber has the second most weeks at #1 of the UK Singles chart among all acts born after 1950.
• Justin Bieber is the only artist ever to sit simultaneously at #1 and #2 in the UK with 3 different set of songs. He was also the first ever to chart at #1, #2 and #3 simultaneously. chart, 1st among solo male artists.
• From 2010-2012, the music video for Baby held the record for the most viewed video YouTube.
• Purpose was the first album to debut with over 200m streams on Spotify.

NB: EAS means Equivalent Album Sales.

Dynamic Spotify Key Performance Indicators

Please note that numbers below are retrieved automatically, so they will evolve day by day unlike previously listed data which is valid as of the publication date of the article.

[xyz-ips snippet="ArtistRandomDetails"]

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

Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs.

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