The Canadian pop star’s tweet, which was retweeted by over 300,000 accounts, has now been claimed to be a prank. One which his fans were not really amused by. It becomes clear that this was most likely a stunt pulled by Justin’s team, to get the world talking again, right before his new compilation album, ‘Journals’, and new film, ‘Believe’, were released. 

All the publicity in the world could not help Bieber at the moment though. His newest album includes the ten singles he promoted during ‘Music Mondays’ and five new tracks. The ten songs released between the months of October and December did not sell that well themselves, so it was no shock that ‘Journals’, which features many of the songs all ready released, only sold 4607 copies in Australia and debuted at number 35 on the ARIA Charts. To put things into comparison, in the lead up to Christmas, Beyonce’s self titled visual album sold 26,904 copies. 

Making things worse, the sequel to the successful ‘Never Say Never’, did not pull in the kind of money at the Box Office that his management was hoping for. The music doco only pulled in $3.1 million, in North America, during its first three days, and is only expected to make $4.5 over its five day debut. The numbers would be disappointing when comparing to ‘Never Say Never’, which earned $29.5 Million on debut, and went on to become the highest grossing concert film of all time in America.

This is strange as I feel that some of the stuff on ‘Journals’, is his strongest yet. I consider Heartbreaker to one of the best songs I’ve heard Justin sing, and Bad Day and All That Matters, have more personnel content when compared to hit singles Boyfriend and Baby. Maybe a early retirement wouldn’t of been the worse thing for Bieber, as he would of been able to quit while on top, or maybe the recent bad press and dismal sales will spur him on to come back better than ever. Only time will tell.