Oh Baby!, Justin Bieber’s comeback, is getting off to an emotional start with the Canadian pop sensation showcasing his sensitive side as he seeks to put his bad boy past behind him.

The approach appears to be working. His new single What Do You Mean? on Thursday notched up more than 21 million streams on Spotify globally in just five days, setting a new record for the music app.

Bieber, now 21, broke down in tears at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards show after singing the song. The sobs, he told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, were authentic.

“Honestly, I just wasn’t expecting them to support me in the way they did. Last time I was at an award show I was booed,” Bieber told Fallon.

Bieber is back on the promotional trail before the November release of his first album in three years, most of which were marked by bad behaviour off stage and a string of court cases that risked damaging his image as a family-friendly teen heart-throb.

Bieber found fame as a 13 year-old and went on to become a global pop phenomenon. He said in January that he wanted to shed the “arrogant” and “conceited” attitude that led to arrests for careless driving, pelting a neighbour’s home with eggs, assaulting a photographer, and abandoning a pet monkey at a German airport.