It would seem that history is repeating itself once again.
Indeed, after November 2010 saw Kanye West‘s ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ outsell Nicki Minaj‘s ‘Pink Friday’ in its first week, only to be outsold by that very album (and watch it hit #1 weeks later), West is now gearing up to watch the same thing happen again….only this time, with Roc Nation‘s J.Cole.
Despite outselling Cole’s new album ‘Sinner’ when his LP ‘Yeezus’ dropped in the same week, this week has seen the latter suffer a cruel 80% decline in sales, kicking it to #3 thanks to 65,271 units sold in its second week of release.
Meanwhile, despite suffering a decline of 72%, Cole brought in 83,652 copies in the same week, placing him one spot beneath Wale‘s ‘The Gifted (151,871)’, which came in at #1.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
According to predictions generated in the last few hours, next week will see Cole shift around 60,000 units- forcing him to the #1 spot his second #1 album in the country.
Pretty epic, considering this feat will comes after sales of the album hit 381,000 units, placing him 119,000 units away from selling half a million units within its first month of release! This, more than likely to happen, considering 60,000 of that 119,000 will be taken care of once next week’s charts roll in, making his journey to Gold even shorter and sweeter.
As if that wasn’t enough, July 2nd saw the release of Elijah Blake‘s brand new single ‘Vendetta‘, produced by the ‘Let Nas Down’ lyricist.
Quite interestingly, less than 24 hours after the cut was released on Ljung’s ‘Soundcloud‘, it generated a 50,000 plays and an estimated 2 million streams via the video sharing site YouTube.
Surprising? Not really- considering a feat just as impressive was scored upon the launch of ‘Bijoux 22′, Blake’s 2012 EP- nabbing the recorded for the fastest downloaded EP in Def Jam history, with 20,000 downloads made its first and second day of release.
While these numbers are great for Hip Hop, one wonders when articles like these will feature the names of R&B acts and their releases.
So, as to gauge your thoughts on the matter, we ask….
What do you think is behind ‘Sinner’s success, and….
What could R&B acts do to replicate it?
Please let us know!