It's seems the public chose to go with the "Backpack Rappers" music of Kanye West over the "Bulletproof Vest" vocals of 50 Cent... or did they??? West, whose "Graduation" widely outsold 50 Cent's "Curtis" in first week sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan: 957,000 copies to 691,000 copies. It almost seems like it wasn't even close. Everyone heard about 50's claim, that if he lost the soundscan battle to Kanye. He would retire. What he didn't specify was, when he would retire.
What most of the public doesn't know. Is that upon a popular albums release, the record label itself may purchase a large number of copies of the album. They do this in order to :
1)Distribute them to street teams to sell back at less than retail value and create more of a buzz.
2)Give them to radio stations to use as free give aways to promote the album.
3)Boost soundscan numbers
Being well aware of this tactic, 50 stressed that he wanted no recouping done by his label. He wanted his soundscan numbers to be, and I quote, "raw."
Anonymous sources inside Def Jam have disclosed that an amount of 275,000 copies were purchased by the label. Now if this is true and you do the math, Kanye would acutally be down by 9,000 records. Not only making it a tight race, but also giving 50 the crown after the first week's sales. But if that happened, there would be no anticipation for a dramatic retirement date or farewell album. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Bringing the truth to you as clear as I possibly can.
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Kanye Outsells 50 Cent... thanks to Def Jam.
Rahsheid White
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1 comment:
I like your acknowledging that 50 didn't acknowledge exactly when he'd retire, and think Kanye should just stick to making music and quit making an ass of himself every time he opens his mouth, but technically 'recouping' is what actually occurs when an artist earns back their advance, at the end of the day Cam'Ron was right, 50 Cent looks like a gorilla with rabbit teeth, someone beefing on everybody and their mother like they have the tightest rhymes in a million years, what hip-hop needs right about now is another kid, another Nas, someone from NYC with lyrics to go, not someone on steroids... albums purchased by a label are drilled through the bar code, every album has a bar code, it's how Nielsen tracks unit sales, labels know which albums were shipped when and when and where they purchased down to each bar code (if they feel like it), but at the end of the day I doubt 50 Cent would say he didn't want his label picking up albums while saying he was going to retire in the same sentence and if he did, then we might just know why he sold a 66% of the albums that Kanye did...
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