The Singles specialists!
Maroon 5’s debut album, Songs About Jane (2002) was an enormous success worldwide. Singles Harder To Breathe, This Love, and She Will Be Loved all charted and sold very well.
Combined sales of the album and singles eventually reached over 20 million copies. This led the band to tour the world for several years before they released the follow-up, It Won’t Be Soon Before Long in 2007, five years after the debut!
It Won’t Be Soon Before Long charted well on the back of the debut and initially, the singles Makes Me Wonder and Wake Up Call charted and sold well too, however, it was soon clear that this was not of the same standard as the debut.
For the third album, Hands All Over (2010) things were initially not looking good. The singles didn’t do as well, even a cover of Crazy Little Thing Called Love and the production being done by Mutt Lange (Shania Twain AC/DC) didn’t seem to help.
It would take a rerelease in 2011, now with the single Moves Like Jagger (featuring Christina Aguilera) to get things going again.
Ironically, Moves Like Jagger wasn’t produced by the capable ears of Mutt but by Swedish Shellback and American Benny Blanco. Another Swede, Jonas Akerlund directed the video.
Moves Like Jagger was an enormous success, nominated for most awards, winning seemingly half of them, it charted at #1 the world over, was picked up by every working band out there, and sold 10 million copies in the U.S. alone.
For Maroon 5’s fourth album, Overexposed (2012), they stuck with the Swedes and added another production legend, Max Martin.
The album charted reasonably well the world over but sales were modest by their standards at just over 2 million worldwide.
The singles from Overexposed did much better than the album. Payphone sold around 8 million, and One More Night sold 6 million in the U.S. alone. To this day, Payphone is Maroon 5’s most streamed tune on Spotify.
On the deluxe version, we also find the amazing Let’s Stay Together by Al Green.
In 2014, the band released V, obviously their 5th album. Crediting 15 producers (that’s more than the album’s 12 tunes!) sales were good, perhaps not great for the album. Again, the singles did better.
The best-performing single from V was Sugar with 11 million copies sold in the U.S.
By now, it was so obvious that Singles were Maroon 5’s thing that they called their Greatest Hits Album Singles (2015). Sales weren’t great but then again, everybody had perhaps already bought them!
Their next album, Red Pill Blues (2017) sticks with the tradition of low album sales, and high single sales, Girls Like You being the best-performing tune with 11 million sales in the U.S.
The 2021 release of Jordi is Maroon 5’s seventh album and not much has changed, the album doesn’t sell anywhere near as much as the singles. Now it’s Memories that sell best with 4 million copies sold in the U.S., clearly a decline but by now, most people stream instead.
In Japan and South Korea, Memories is streamed 1.5 billion times! One would assume the world tour for this album focused on this part of the world.
Maroon 5 Tunes | Related Pages
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
You can learn how to play Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen using chords, lyrics, chord analysis, and the original recording.
| D (Dsus4) | D (Dsus4) | G | C G/B |
This thing called love, I just can’t handle it…
Let’s Stay Together
You can learn how to play Let’s Stay Together by Al Green using chords, lyrics, chord analysis, and the original recording.
| F (Fsus4) | F | Dm9 | Dm9 |
I, I’m so in love with you…
Moves Like Jagger
Learn how to play Moves Like Jagger by Maroon 5 (and Christina Aguilera) using chords, lyrics, chord analysis, TAB, and the original recording.
||: (Bm9sus4) Bm7 :|| x4
You shoot for the stars, if it feels right. And in for my heart, if you feel like…
Maroon 5 on the web
Artists & Bands
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Find out more about these great Artists & Bands, and let their tunes guide you to success.
About me | Dan Lundholm
This was an article about Maroon 5 tunes, by Dan Lundholm. Discover more about him and learn guitar with Spytunes.
Most importantly, find out why you should learn guitar through playing tunes, not practising scales, and studying theory in isolation.
