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As previously noted, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III blew into the No. 1 spot on this week’s album charts thanks to a sales total that just broke the million mark–a feat that isn’t all surprising given last week’s early-bird chart debut, but is still probably causing some chilling-since-2005 Champagne corks to get popped in the offices of Universal Music Group.
Biggest Debuts: It wasn’t right behind Carter, but Plies’ Definition Of Real did tally some impressive numbers, selling 215,000 copies and entering the chart at No. 2. Perhaps most notable about this feat was that Plies accomplished it by wearing himself around his neck:
Is it as bad as his smoking book from last year? I honestly can’t decide.
In other debut news, N*E*R*D sold 80,000 copies of its new album Seeing Sounds and debuted at No. 7; Alanis Morrissette’s Flavors Of Entanglement sold 70,000 copies and came in at No. 8; and 49,000 people decided that My Morning Jacket’s recorded output was as worthy of their money as the band’s live show, as Evil Urges entered at No. 9.
Notable Jumps: He may be holding his albums back from iTunes, but Kid Rock’s Rock And Roll Jesus is still selling, with a 25% jump this week (No. 19, 28,000) that puts it just on the edge of reaching the million-sold mark.
Dropping Off: Weezer’s latest play for the geeks was down 64% (No. 10, 46,000 sold), and the album that beat it out for No. 1 last week, Disturbed’s Indestructible, took a 60% hit (No. 4, 102,000 sold).
Nickelback Award For Inexplicable Durability: Speaking of albums that entered the charts a week ago, Journey’s Revelation took a mere 15% week-to-week hit, selling 89,000 copies and dipping from No. 5 to No. 6. Given that the Wal-Mart strategy worked even better for the Eagles and our Arnel Pineda/Steve Perry comparison posts have attracted more long tail traffic than pretty much anything else on the site (or I should say, anything that isn’t related to that Meg White impersonator who made her way around the Internet last fall), I shouldn’t be as surprised by this relatively small drop, but I guess “news that isn’t as bad as it should have been” is an anomaly for the music business these days.
Postscript: Alanis’ new album came in at No. 2 on the digital chart, selling just under 25,000 copies–or more than 35% of her overall sales total. The idea that Morrissette’s fans may be in the demographic sweet spot for ditching the physical and going for the digital copies of new releases was further borne out by another ’90s alt-rock star whose album hit physical and virtual shelves last week: Jakob Dylan, who came in at No. 24 on the big chart with 24,000 sales and entered the digital-albums chart at No. 9 with 8,500 copies sold. (By comparison, Tha Carter III topped the digital-albums chart with just about 100,000 sales (10% of its overall total), and Plies’ digital-album sales comprised just 2.8% of his overall sales total (6,100, No. 9).)
This week’s top 20 albums, with sales totals in parentheses:
1. Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III (1,000,000)
2. Plies, Definition Of Real (215,000)
3. Now 28 (132,000)
4. Disturbed, Indestructible (102,000)
5. Usher, Here I Stand (101,000)
6. Journey, Revelation (89,000)
7. N*E*R*D, Seeing Sounds (80,000)
8. Alanis Morrissette, Flavors Of Entanglement (70,000)
9. My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges (49,000)
10. Weezer (46,000)
11. 3 Doors Down (38,000)
12. Sex And The City soundtrack (35,000)
13. Ashanti, Declaration (34,000)
14. Leona Lewis, Spirit (33,000)
15. Duffy, Rockferry (30,000)
16. Taylor Swift (30,000)
17. Frank Sinatra, Nothing But The Best (29,000)
18. Toby Keith, 35 Biggest Hits (29,000)
19. Kid Rock, Rock N Roll Jesus (28,000)
20. Mongomery Gentry, Back When I Knew It All (27,000)
This week’s top 10 digital albums, with sales totals in parentheses:
1. Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III (100,000)
2. Alanis Morrissette, Flavors Of Entanglement (25,000)
3. N*E*R*D, Seeing Sounds (16,000)
4. My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges (15,000)
5. Disturbed, Indestructible (12,000)
6. Sex And The City soundtrack (10,000)
7. Weezer (8,900)
8. Jakob Dylan, Seeing Things (8,500)
9. Plies, Definition Of Real (6,100)
10. Usher, Here I Stand (5,300)
That means that Coldplay is not guaranteed a #1 album next week, right?
@Ruf: They sold 140k on itunes alone in their first day, I’d say they’ve got next week in the bag.
Re: Lil Wayne, I’m not at all surprised. There is a severe shortage of commercially-released *rap* albums these days. Sure you’ve got Plies and Akon and everybody modernizing R&B music, but little room is left for showcasing actual rappers with lyrical skills.
There are some really impressive sales #’s this week, kudos to the industry. For now, anyways….
Dudes, “Arnel Pineda” is Google-hit gold. I have seen it with my own eyes.
Wow, well I know that My Morning Jacket has some hippie-crossover potential, but I truly don’t have a grasp on just how popular they are. Debuting at #9 is pretty great for them. And they’re plaing MSG on New Year’s Eve? That’s crazy. Can MMJ actuall fill the Garden?
Key passage from today’s New York Times story:
“In April, before his album was leaked, Lil Wayne was the most pirated artist on file-sharing networks, going by BigChampagne, a company that tracks peer-to-peer online activity…
“‘That speaks to the quantity of his output, which is plentiful, as well as the depth of his audience’s engagement,’ said Eric Garland, BigChampagne’s chief executive. ‘If you’re a fan, you’re most likely a serious fan. And while people who like an individual song are not going to open their wallets for you, people who like 10 songs will. I think the mixtape phenomenon is great for feeding the machine, which is what the music industry is about in the 21st century.’”
This bit of marketing-speak is actually the most cogent theory I’ve yet heard for how Weezy pulled this off. Basically, it upends the industry’s long-held wariness over mixtapes and theories about the value of “scarcity” – Lil Wayne managed to turn ubiquity to his advantage. By releasing so many songs, the value of an “official” Lil Wayne album became, perversely, greater. It’s like he made his “brand” so inescapable that people felt ready to buy when the big product dropped.
It’s even smarter and more counterintuitive than Weezy normally gets credit for.
Gold?? Are you kidding me? Try plastic. You know copy, impersonator. Arnelis a good karoke singer. Steve Perry was, is and will ALWAYS BE GOLD. You can’t replace the best with the rest.
@PerrysGirl: Journey- Wheel In The Sky.
Ahem….
The New Yorker
HIGH AND MIGHTY
Lil Wayne takes over hip-hop.
by Sasha Frere-Jones
AUGUST 13, 2007
Lil Wayne’s theatricality sets him apart from the monotonous blowhards of thugdom. Photograph by Piotr Sikora.
KEYWORDS
Lil Wayne (Carter, Dwayne); Rappers, Rap Music; “Tha Carter III”; Cash Money; “Tha Block is Hot”; “Go D.J.”; Jay-Z
wayne Carter, the twenty-four-year-old rapper from New Orleans known as Lil Wayne, hasn’t released an album or a single in months, though he has appeared as a guest on songs by other artists. But he is indisputably the rapper of the year. He has been recording songs constantly-sometimes three or four a night. Many are astonishingly good, and most eventually find their way onto the Internet, where they can be downloaded for free, apparently with his blessing. Among hip-hop fans, discussion has been dominated by talk of Lil Wayne-his place in the hip-hop canon, his romantic status, his sexual orientation, and the release date of his sixth album, “Tha Carter III.” Last week, MTV’s “hip-hop brain trust”-ten staffers-voted Lil Wayne the “hottest m.c. in the game.”
In four years, Lil Wayne has evolved from a fairly predictable Southern gangsta rapper into an artist who may actually deserve the bragging rights to “best rapper alive,” his current motto. His raspy, pixillated croak is as distinctive as Bob Dylan’s piercing Klaxon whine, and his music conveys the same sense of headlong propulsion that Dylan’s did in 1965. (Lil Wayne’s subject matter-drugs, women, and gunplay-is more typical of the blues songs that Dylan idolized than of Dylan’s own material.) Lil Wayne’s verse on DJ Khaled’s “We Takin’ Over,” which was released in March, is thirty seconds of uncontrolled id: he sounds demented enough to make the gothic boast “I am the beast-feed me rappers or feed me beats” seem like empirical description. The material that Lil Wayne (or his associates) has posted on the Internet so far this year could make up several albums, and the range of the work is impressive. On “Something You Forgot,” he delivers self-critique and emotional vulnerability: “Pain-since I’ve lost you, I’m lost, too. Nigga feeling like he at the bottom, like a horseshoe.” On “Kush,” he strings together loopy rhymes about tooth fairies, turtles, and marijuana, and on “Did It Before,” over a beat by Kanye West that could be a sample of a New Orleans funk band, he tells a shaggy-dog story about promiscuity.
Lil Wayne grew up in Hollygrove, a working-class neighborhood known for producing R. & B. singers and hip-hop m.c.s, and began his career unusually young. When he was eleven, he befriended Bryan (Baby) Williams, a rapper and the co-owner of a highly successful New Orleans hip-hop label called Cash Money. Lil Wayne recorded rhymes on Williams’s answering machine and hung around the label’s offices. Williams mentored the genuinely little Wayne, including him in various group recordings, and in 1999, when Lil Wayne was seventeen, released his first solo album, “Tha Block Is Hot.” Cash Money made its name by putting out a cheap and dirty gangsta rap that featured all the threats and braggadocio that you could find anywhere else but also a uniquely lighthearted swagger and supple cadences that made even the dorkiest boast appealing. (Lil Wayne was already enough of a ham to know that stage-whispering the phrase “the block is hot, the block is hot” sounded more threatening than yelling it.)
The House of Rhone to Lyor Kallman: “I raise you 20 times the stock value of WMG. What chu got at Atlantic to match Weezy?”