Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience becomes the first album to sell 2 million copies in 2013 in its 14th week (it has been in the top 10 the entire time). That is more than either of Timberlake’s previous solo albums had sold at the same point. You don’t need me to tell you that the trend in sales usually runs the other way. Sales usually start to taper off when artists have been around for years. Timberlake took a huge risk going 6-1/2 years between studio albums. That’s a lifetime in pop music. The 20/20 Experience has sold more than twice as many copies as its two chief rivals, Bruno Mars’ Unorthodox Jukebox (963K copies sold in 2013) and Mumford & Sons’ Babel (873K sold in 2013). 20/20 entered The Billboard 200 at #1 with first-week sales of 968K. It set a new record for the biggest one-week sales tally for an album by a male pop artist since 1991, when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales for Billboard.
