In my defense, I wrote my column unaware that him was getting a prime slot from MTV at the end of the VMAs on Sunday night. I had Weezy doing around 400K, in line with Watch the Throne, but Billboard now reports TC4 more than doubling that. And it’s delivered sales beyond most estimations.Ĭolor me humbled: My prediction last Friday for Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter IV first-week sales total was way, way off. Where they bought it remains to be seen, but the Drake-delivered reminder to buy it on iTunes that MTV threw up on Sunday and the availability of physical copies in stores on Monday made this both a digital and traditional rollout. The usual assortment of guest verses (on Chris Brown’s “Look At Me Now” and Ace Hood’s “Hustle Hard” remix, notably) kept Weezy’s croak on the airwaves during the run-up to the long-gestating album, and there’s certainly some element of his following that bought it for the singles. He’s got two of the Hot 100’s top eight songs, both C4 singles, and features on “I’m On One,” now No.
Wayne remained on radio despite his prison bid, too, and seemed to be as omnipresent as ever leading up to C4. (The miserable Sorry 4 The Wait probably accomplished something similar.) None of that made C4 look like a better buy, but it did remind Wayne’s massive fan base that it was about to be available, and the snark from the many non-fans in the VMAs’ record-breaking audience might have helped redouble Weezy Nation’s support for their slightly tarnished star. Throne was a massive event on Twitter, with a virtually leak-free release creating a 140’d frenzy at midnight on its release date C4 did that and more, building off lukewarm to bad buzz and “beef”-fueled chatter following its days-early leak with the splashy thrashing Wayne did at the VMAs. Lil Wayne’s latest LP is slated to nearly double Watch The Throne‘s first week, with projected sales topping 850,000 to WTT‘s 436,000, and it could well lap its purer-pedigree critical superior. Tha Carter IV is going to prove that a 28-year-old rapper with a prodigious work rate and well-established ubiquity can still sell more copies of a disappointing album in 2011 than two 34-plus rappers who made a far better album.
I called on two Wayne watchers to offer their theories on this album’s blowup: Andy Hutchins, who gave the record a rather lukewarm review in this space shortly after it dropped and Chris Molanphy, who made some predictions regarding the album’s first-week sales. That’s an impressive number for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that not many chart theorists were expecting its week-one sales to even pass the 436,000 first-week mark of Kanye West and Jay-Z’s recent album Watch The Throne, let alone nearly lap it. Yesterday Billboard reported that Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter IV-the hyperactive MC’s proper followup to 2008’s Tha Carter III, which moved a million copies in its first week-might go on to sell as many as 850,000 copies in its first week out.
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