Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience was the most popular album of 2013, with 2.43 million units sold. To put that into perspective: 2.43 million would have been meh enough to finish number-eight in 2003, between R. Kelly’s Chocolate Factory and Hillary Duff’s Metamorphosis (2003 wasn’t that long ago, yet it’s SO long ago). Let’s go back another 10 years, to 1993, when the 10th best selling album of the year was Stone Temple Pilot’s Core. I can’t find how many copies were sold in 1993, but to date, more than eight million people have regretted spending good money on Core, so The 20/20 Experience probably wouldn’t have ranked in the top-50 that year.
The reasons are obvious: torrents, Spotify, more access to more music, etc. But it’s still amazing that Justin Timberlake, as genuine a pop star as we have these days, was TECHNICALLY less popular in 2013 than Shaggy in 2001. Still, most musicians would kill for JT’s 2.43: the rest of the top-ten are Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (1.73), Luke Bryan’s Crash My Party (1.52), Imagine Dragons’ Night Visions (1.4), Bruno Mars’s Unorthodox Jukebox (1.4), Florida Georgia Line’s Here’s to the Good Times (1.35), Drake’s Nothing Was the Same (1.34), Beyonce’s Beyonce (1.3), Blake Shelton’s Based On a True Story (1.1), and Jay Z’s Magna Carta…Holy Grail (1.1).
Yikes. Also, what the hell is a Florida Georgia Line?
