Justin Timberlake’s third solo album, The 20/20 Experience, enters The Billboard 200 at #1 with first-week sales of 968K. That’s the biggest one-week sales tally since Taylor Swift’s Red sold 1,208,000 copies in its first week in October. It’s the biggest one-week tally by a male artist since Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III opened with sales of 1,006,000 in September 2008. It’s the biggest one-week tally in the first quarter of the year (when sales are generally slower) since 50 Cent’s The Massacre opened with sales of 1,141,000 in March 2005.
The 20/20 Experience also 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. This stat excludes R&B (Usher), country (Garth Brooks) and rap (Eminem, 50 Cent and Lil Wayne). Who held the previous record? Try and guess. Details below.
First-week sales projections for Timberlake’s album were revised upward several times, from the initial forecast of 500K on March 11. About the only disappointment for Timberlake is that 20/20 just missed becoming the 19th album to sell 1 million copies in a week since 1991. No album has ever come so close to the magic 1M mark without quite reaching it.
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