Jay-Z’ “MCHG” Tops Historically Great Sales Week for Hip-Hop Posted by Nathan S. on 07/17/13 | Filed under Opinion, Jay-Z, Sales

Starting with the Battle of June 18, this past month has been an album sales nerd's wet dream. Every week has been another chance to dissect the state of the music industry, and some of our favorite rappers, and today is no different. After weeks of speculation and assumption, it's official. According to Billboard, Jay-Z' "Magna Carta Holy Grail" debuted at number one, with 527,000 first week copies, a significantly higher number than most initially predicted.

Before we even get into the specifics of "Magna Carta Holy Grail", and beyond, let's just pause for a moment to acknowledge Jay-Z's resume. Every Jay-Z solo album since his first number-one, '98's ""Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life" has also debuted number one. Every...fucking...one. Total he's now sold more than 50 million albums, and has the most number one albums of any solo artist ever (13), trailing only the Beatles (19) for the most number one albums ever by a solo artist or group. Incredibly, unlike nearly every other major rapper, and nearly every other artist period, his album sales are actually rising recently: "Magna Carta" debuted significantly better than his last two projects, "Watch the Throne" and "The Blueprint 3".

In other words... When I wrote the "Rap Power Rankings" I had Jay-Z as the unquestioned number one, and no one's even attempted to argue otherwise, but until I once again reviewed his resume for this article, I don't know if it had truly sunk in just how far above everyone else he is. Whoever you have as the number two most powerful rapper, there's a chasm/abyss between them and Hova. There's clearly only one explanation for Hova's success; the Illuminati.

Moving on....

The big question when the Samsung deal went through was how much all those free download would affect album sales, and now we know, probably not very much. Sure, hypothetically "MCHG' could have done even better without Samsung, and without the leak Samsung caused, but Jay still had the second best debut week of any artist this year, topping Daft Punk and behind only Justin Timberlake's "20/20".* Here are the lessons I think we can draw:

1) Even though he's now a thoroughly middle-aged rapper in a young man's game, interest in Jay-Z is still at an all-time high. You just can't call yourself a hip-hop fan without at least having heard Hova's new album and forming an opinion on it.

2) As we discussed in that Dream piece, even though "HCHG" sold half-a-milli and was streamed to one-million people via Samsung, we all know that's not an accurate reflection of how many people really heard the album. It'd be impossible to accurately track, but considering all non-purchased downloads and streams, how many people do you think have heard this album? 5 million? 10 million? More?

3) It's a glass half-full, half-empty situation. You could say, "Hey, at the very least Jay's popular enough to overcome the Samsung stream, and maybe even drove people to buy more copies of the album as they heard it and liked it." Or, you could say, "That Samsung stream was so shitty that it wasn't a viable alternative to buying the album to even the one-million people who got it, and they went out and bought the album on iTunes anyway." Both are probably true, but regardless, any talk of these kind of mass streams totally replacing album sales is clearly premature. I'm willing to bet Samsung's ultimately happy about the incredible amount of publicity they got for doing this, but I don't think there's anyway we can call the Samsung app, as a way to deliver music, a success. #OldRulesWon

Believe it or not though, this week isn't all about Shawn Corey Carter, it was also a historically good week for hip-hop and urban music. Generally speaking hip-hop's sales power compared to pop and rock are as low as they've been since the late '90s, but rap is fucking dominating right now. Jay-Z' at number one, J. Cole is number three, Kanye is number six and Wale is number seven. Impressively, all four of those albums have been number one at one point over the last month, and have clearly had some real staying power. And if you want to count Ciara's new album at number two, then urban music has literally half of the top ten on lock. (Six out of ten if you get generous and include Macklemore at number ten.)

Even better, whether you loved all four of those albums - "MCHG", "Yeezus", "Born Sinner" and "The Gifted" - or not, all of them are at the very least worthy of some serious artistic discussion. Hip-hop's not doing these numbers making super pop/radio singles, it's doing it making music deep enough to dig into. I won't say there's never been a better time to be a hip-hop fan, but despite all the alarmists, this is as good as we've had it in years.

Let's celebrate...

* In retrospect how incredible is JT doing 968K first week? He nearly doubled Jay.

See Also:  The-Dream Just Accidentally Broke Down the State of Music Finance
See Also:  Wale’s “The Gifted” is #1, Where Does He Belong in the Rap Power Rankings?