This Week in Sales: Lil Wayne’s “Carter IV” Sells A Milli

This week I'll be devoting the entire sales column to one topic and one topic only: Lil Wayne's (almost) one million in first week sales of "Carter IV", an album that, I think we can all agree, sucked like than a drunk college girl on spring break. So how do we explain 964,000 in sales?

Simple - Lil Wayne is pop. Or rather, he's the new generation of pop. He may not sound like Taylor Swift (yet), but in an era where the lines between rap, rock, R&B and traditional pop are blurring by the minute, he's the new pop's poster child, a rapper with face tattoos who dresses like a skater and sings over acoustic guitar tracks (a la Ms. Swift). Like some sort of rapping Voltron, he's assembled enough different parts to encompass everything, giving everyone a reason to buy his album.

It's an oversimplification in some ways, but any music industry marketer will tell you that young white kids buy a lot of music, nd this proves it. I can't name one serious hip-hop head who bought this album - if they were curious enough they just stole it - but it hardly mattered. Serious hip-hop heads don't spend much money, especially now. The best you could possibly expect from them is "Watch the Throne" numbers. But teenagers? The ones with a Drake poster in their room, Nicki Minaj wallpaper on their laptop and a Lil Wayne avatar on their Twitter, they'll spend every dollar they can possibly squeeze our of their parents' pockets.

In retrospect then, his even more terribler (not a typo) album "The Rebirth" and "How to Love" smart moves. If his goal was to further drive home the point that he's a cross-genre artist, or more specifically an artist that was bigger than rap, he won and then some. It's fucking crazy to think that we've reached the point where kids are buying Weezy albums like they used to buy Jonas Brothers albums, but we're at that point. That's right - the same grilled-out teenager chanting "drop it like it's hot" ten years ago is now the most popular rapper in the world.

And as long as we're at it, when the Jay-Z diss came out a lot of people said it was just an attempt to sell more records. Well, if that was his intention, I seriously doubt it worked. As we already discussed, the only people who really cared about that diss were rap heads, and they didn't buy this album. Ten years ago when they would have had to had bought the album just to get the song, they would have. But today? Today they just downloaded that shit from RefinedHype.

On a closing note, this doesn't excuse Wayne from making a shitty album. He could have really buckled down and made something so undeniably dope that the rap heads and the white teens would buy it. Just imagine if he put as much work into this as Kanye put into "MBDTF". We could be looking at the biggest rap album ever. That's right, as insane as it sounds I don't think 2 million first week is out of Wayne's reach - if only he cared.