I'm vaguely out of touch with the current state of popular music, mostly because I don't listen to the radio. Ever. Because of this, I was shocked to find out that Lil' Wayne's most recent album, The Carter III, went platinum in its first week of release. According to Billboard magazine, the last person who did that was 50 Cent in 2005.
I'll state up front that I've never been a big fan of rap music, so I was caught off guard by this sudden seemingly impossible event when I came across it. Though with a bit more research, I also learned that Lil Wayne had seven songs on the Hot 100 chart at the same time, which is amazing for someone who hasn't been on American Idol.
After the previous week's top album not even topping 300,000 in the first week, this is HUGE! Yet somehow, overall sells are still 3% lower than this time last year. Tepid news for a seemingly stale industry.
But Universal obviously did something right. Inadvertently they proved that people are still buying hard copy albums, and enough people are willing to buy an album to make it reach levels common for boybands and other teen idols a decade ago. What did they do? Is Lil Wayne somehow filling a void in the musical stratosphere that people were craving? Was there a hype machine behind his album that has been lacking every where else?
What about this album made over a million people rush out to buy it in the first week of release? And can it possibly be altered in a way to help create interest for other artists? This is something that should be explored by people with far more access to information than I have because something happened. Though it will never be common for first week numbers to hit over a million, it's now been proven to not be impossible. All the pieces fell into place for Universal and Lil Wayne. Now it's time for them to analyze what those pieces were and take them apart to see if they can molded into something else to spark the public's interest for other artists.
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