Justin Bieber's new album Justice had the lowest first-week sales of his career but managed to debut at the top of the Billboard 200 chart – making it the Canadian singer's eighth No. 1 album.
On Sunday afternoon, the 27-year-old singer tweeted simply “#Beliebers.” In another message, he shared: “Love you guys. Thank you for all the incredible support.”
All six of Bieber’s studio albums have topped the U.S. albums chart, as well as 2011’s Never Say Never: The Remixes and 2013’s Believe Acoustic. Last February, Bieber became the youngest artist to earn seven No. 1 albums, breaking a record set nearly 60 years ago by Elvis Presley.
But, Bieber's first three studio albums had first-week sales of 283,000, 210,000 and 374,00 copies respectively.
Billboard then updated its methodology for the album chart to count not only sales of physical copies but also downloads and streams of tracks from an album. Ten song downloads, 3,750 ad-supported streams, or 1,250 on-demand audio or video streams each count as one album sale.
Bieber’s fourth and fifth studio albums debuted with 649,000 and 231,000 "equivalent album units" respectively.
Justice made it to No. 1 with 154,000 "equivalent album units" – of which a little over 30,000 were physical copies, a bit more than 4,000 came from song downloads and 119,000 were streams.
The chart, dated April 3, will be published Tuesday.
Justice knocked country star Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album from No. 1 after a record-breaking 10 consecutive weeks.