Justin Timberlake has a reason to celebrate—technically, 2013 was his year, as the singer/ actor/ former boy-band performer/ former denim suit enthusiast’s album, The 20/20 Experience, was the best-selling album of 2013. But, as we said, technically—while The 20/20 Experience was indeed the best-selling album of 2013, it was also the lowest-selling of any year’s best-selling albums since Nielsen began recording sales figures in 1991.
So, not only did Timberlake get the best-selling album of 2013, he also gets to be the most recent poster-child for the recording industry’s seemingly never-ending decline into obsolescence. For example—as The AV Club points out, while The 20/20 Experience sold 2.43 million copies in 2014, Adele’s 21 more than doubled that in 2011 with 5.82 million copies sold, and then went on to be 2012’s best-seller as well, with an additional 4.41 million. Further, The 20/20 Experience was the only album to sell more than two million copies in 2013.
In fact, it seems the only piece of the music market to continue in sales is in the vinyl section of your local record shop—vinyl sales increased by 33%, while just about any other format, from CD to digital, dropped.
What do you think of the Timberlake news?