Idolator

Lil Wayne's long-awaited Tha Carter III sold more than a million copies in its first official week on store shelves, according to Soundscan—a tally that's more than four times his previous biggest-sales-week total of 238,000, which was reached by Tha Carter II in 2005. Tha Carter III is the industry's first platinum-in-a-week album since March of that year, when 50 Cent's The Massacre moved 1.14 million copies in a truncated sales week. In "cognitive dissonance" news, today also welcomed an IFPI survey claiming that worldwide music sales have reached a 20-year low, which leads me to think that the majors are going to start their global hunt for Lil Wayne clones, oh, right about now. [Billboard]