News

Lil Wayne Passes the 1 Million Mark

Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III has scored the music industry's biggest first-week sales numbers since 50 Cent's The Massacre in 2005, shifting more than a million copies according to Nielsen SoundScan numbers. To put things in perspective, the largest sales week of 2007 was Kanye West's The Graduation (957,000 units), and Lil Wayne's biggest previous hit was 2005's Tha Carter II, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts and sold 238,000 at the starting gate.

Other Top 10 debuts this week include Plies' Definition of Real (215,000 copies sold at a No. 2 chart position), N.E.R.D.'s Seeing Sounds (80,000 copies at No. 7), and My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges (49,000 copies at No. 9—the band's first-ever Top 10 disc). Overall, album sales are up 22.8-percent from last week, but down 3.1-percent from the same week last year.

—The ARTISTdirect Staff
06.19.08