Home » Sounds, Spotlight

Lil Wayne Easily Tops Jay-Z & Kanye’s Album Sales

Submitted by on September 6, 2011 – 9:00 am16 Comments
Share

It’s official: Lil Wayne has produced the highest-selling first-week hip-hop album of the year and has exceeded all expectations when it comes to being rap’s reigning god.

We pontificated in recent months the Tha Carter IV may not live up to the high quality of albums Wayne is known to produce, were worried about its release, and even analyzed if Jay-Z and Kanye West‘s Watch The Throne opus was a thinly-veiled aim at Wayne. But less than three weeks after the US iTunes store’s single-week album sales record was broken by Jay and ‘Ye’s album, it’s been smashed again by Tha Carter IV.

According to Billboard, Tha Carter IV has sold over 300,000 downloads via iTunes in only its first four days of release, outpacing the 290,000 Throne moved through iTunes in its entire first week. Carter‘s achievement is all the more impressive because it’s available through all digital and physical retailers, not just iTunes. Comparatively, Throne was sold exclusively through iTunes for its first four days of release.

Carter IV is on its way to an overall first-week tally of more than 850,000 copies (digital and physical sales combined, according to record sales counters) and official Nielsen SoundScan figures will be in early tomorrow.

If the album manages to shift 850,000 or more, it will instantly mark the biggest sales week for a hip-hop album (or one by a male artist) since Weezy’s own Tha Carter III bowed with 1.01 million on the June 28, 2008 chart. Carter III is one of only 17 albums to have sold a million or more in one week since SoundScan began tracking data in 1991.

Related Posts with Thumbnails

16 Comments »

Leave a comment!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS. Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

We want to keep in touch with you. If you give us your email address, you may receive marketing emails from the DJ Networks family. We hope that's cool.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.