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20 Things You Didn’t Know About Justin Bieber

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A pop star raised in small-town Ontario turned into a chart-record machine — and the trivia behind it is stranger than the headlines.

Justin Bieber’s 2016 comeback wasn’t just about the music. After a rough stretch of 2013 and 2014 headlines, Purpose put him back on top of the charts, and a new wave of profiles started digging into the offbeat details of how he got there in the first place. TheThings Celebrity’s rundown, “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Justin Bieber,” pulls together the trivia — the bidding war that signed him, the instruments he taught himself, and the record book entries most fans never clocked.

• Talent manager Scooter Braun stumbled onto Bieber’s home-recorded cover videos on YouTube by accident, which set off a signing competition between Justin Timberlake and Usher — Usher won out, and Bieber signed to Island Records.
• Guinness World Records credited Bieber as the first artist ever to occupy all three top spots on the UK singles chart at once, with “Love Yourself,” “Sorry,” and “What Do You Mean?”
• Bieber’s charity work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and Pencils of Promise has been part of the public rehabilitation effort following his 2013–2014 legal and personal troubles.

From Stratford Bedroom to a Bidding War

Bieber grew up in Stratford, Ontario, raised mostly by his mother, Pattie Mallette, in circumstances nowhere near the arena-tour money that would follow. He taught himself drums, guitar, piano, and trumpet before anyone in the industry knew his name — the same self-taught instincts that later let him sit down at a piano on stage without a lesson to his credit. When he was 12 or 13, Braun clicked play on one of his cover videos looking for something else entirely, and within a short stretch Timberlake and Usher were both trying to sign him. Usher closed the deal, and that decision put a Stratford kid on Island Records’ roster and, eventually, on global tours.

That same rivalry-adjacent dynamic — famous names competing over the same young talent — has echoed in other corners of the industry, the kind of thing covered in pieces like celebrity relationships that started out friendly and didn’t stay that way.

The Quirks Behind the Onesies

The trivia list leans into the personal habits that don’t usually make the tabloids: Bieber is claustrophobic, can solve a Rubik’s Cube in under two minutes, and speaks conversational French. He’s also known for a fondness for onesies as off-duty wear, and for leaning on Will Smith as something of a regular life mentor through the ups and downs of fame. None of it is scandal — it’s the texture that separates a pop star from the caricature of one.

Guinness World Records named Bieber the first artist ever to hold all three top slots on the UK singles chart simultaneously — “Love Yourself,” “Sorry,” and “What Do You Mean?”

Record Books and a Reputation Rebuild

The chart sweep is the kind of stat that gets repeated because it’s genuinely rare — three songs from one artist sitting at number one, two, and three on the UK singles chart at the same time, with Guinness making it official. That run came on the back of Purpose, the album that turned 2015 into Bieber’s comeback year after a string of controversies in 2013 and 2014 had dominated coverage of him more than his music did.

Alongside the chart numbers, the piece points to his charitable work — extensive involvement with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and Pencils of Promise — as part of the broader image turnaround. It’s the kind of pairing that shows up across pop music generally, where an artist’s off-stage choices get weighed against the headlines that came before, a pattern examined in profiles of musicians who turned out to be nothing like their public image.

The Instruments and the Discovery Story

What ties the whole trivia list together is the gap between the kid who taught himself piano and trumpet in Ontario and the artist whose chart record now sits in Guinness’s books. Braun’s accidental click on a home video, the Timberlake-versus-Usher scramble that followed, and the self-taught musicianship underneath it all are the parts of the Bieber story that rarely make it into the tour-grossing headlines, but they’re the parts that explain how a kid from Stratford ended up there at all.

The UK chart record — all three top spots, one artist — was still standing as Bieber’s Purpose era rolled on through 2016, and it’s the number that keeps getting cited whenever anyone tries to measure just how big that comeback actually was.