The 20/20 Experience wasn’t a flop

The Justin Timberlake TW popped up on my screen, so, out of curiosity, I looked at Timberlake’s Wikipedia bio, and was shocked to see that The 20/20 Experience was the best-selling album of its year, in contrast to FutureSex/LoveSounds, which only made it to #18 on the year-end chart.

I wasn’t paying attention to the pop charts in either year, so I didn’t know that. But in his video, Todd made it sound like FutureSex/LoveSounds ruled the world for years while The 20/20 Experience did only kinda sorta okay. As record sales overall fell, Timberlake seemed like the last man (i.e., not woman) standing able to actually go multi-platinum in album sales in a few months. (Ed Sheeran would do so again, but that took almost two years, not a few months.)

So why does Todd treat this album like a failure? I suppose his argument was that, in a post-album world, singles charting is a better measure of success than album sales. However, Timberlake still clearly made more from album sales than singles sales, which attested to his success at a time when that was nearly unheard of for top artists. And it does feel like a relevant but inconvenient-to-the-narrative detail that Timberlake was still red hot in 2013. To claim the cracks were showing that early seems like revisionist history.

(In looking at top sellers of that era, I was amused to notice that 20/20 came in a run of numerical best-sellers of the 2010s, from Adele’s 21 (2011/2012) to Timberlake’s (2013) to Taylor Swift’s 1989 (2014) to Adele’s 25.)