Some say it’s been a long time coming – Lil Wayne has finally made his way to the top of his profession. Despite the fact that Lil Wayne has been rapping since he was just a teen, it has taken a lot of hard work and dedication to get to the point where is he now that he is able to rival top contemporaries like Kanye West. What has really got heads turning is the fact that this 25-year-old’s most recent CD has sold a whopping one million copies in just one week!
Ron Williams, co-founder of Lil Wayne’s record label “Cash Money Records”, seems to think that it was inevitable. Williams remarked that Lil Wayne has been hard at work for a long time doing mixtapes and featuring on other musician’s records. In the process he’s been building up a fan base and this meant that a lot of people were anticipating the release of his new record. Williams said “he just came with something different” and that no doubt gave Lil Wayne the edge he needed in an already competitive industry. Lil Wayne’s first album, “Tha Carter” sold 1.1 million copies and his second, “Tha Carter II” sold 1.4 million copies. So, despite the fact that other people have been looking at Williams as if he were insane when he insisted that the new record sales would reach a million, Williams no doubt had faith that Lil Wayne’s record sales would continue to improve. And he was right. What makes the feat even more remarkable is that the industry is currently experiencing a massive slump. Other artists are only selling about 200 000 albums in one week – and that’s on a good week. Lil’ Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” is the first album to sell more than a million copies in its first week since 50 Cent’s “The Massacre” was released in 2005.
Lil Wayne has yet to find his way up the UK charts, but he certainly doesn’t seem to be bothered by that fact. After selling 423 000 copies of his new album on just the first day of release, who can blame him? And this, despite being leaked on the internet and heavily bootlegged. Clearly “Tha Carter III” had everything fans wanted and more.