(USA Today) –Lil Wayne’s long-anticipated Tha Carter IV made its debut with sales that can be attributed to brand loyalty and a well-timed marketing plan. Even though the album leaked on the Internet days before its release Aug. 29, it sold 964,000 copies and gave Lil Wayne his third career chart-topper on the Billboard 200 chart, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The week also saw the top 10 debut of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ I’m With You (No. 2 with 228,000), David Guetta’s Nothing But the Beat (No. 5 with 56,000) and Jake Owen’s Barefoot Blue Jean Night (No. 6 with 55,000).
Tha Carter IV’s sales are second this year to Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, which sold 1.1 million in May with a boost of a two-day 99-cent promotion on Amazon. Tha Carter IV broke iTunes’ one-week downloads record with 345,000. The album was released just after midnight Aug. 29, only minutes after Lil Wayne had closed MTV’s Video Music Awards broadcast with his hit How to Love.
“He is a superstar with an incredibly huge following,” says Keith Caufield, Billboard’s associate director of charts/retail. “The brand name ‘Carter’ holds a lot of weight when you see it next to Lil Wayne in much the same way as ‘Blueprint’ does with Jay-Z. You expect quality and creativity.”
Tha Carter III sold more than 1 million copies when it made its debut in 2008 and has totaled than 3.7 million.
Chuck Creekmur, allhiphop.com’s CEO, says Lil Wayne benefited from the lull between Carter albums. Even as Lil Wayne spent most of last year in a New York prison on gun charges, Tha Carter IV loomed. Two lightly promoted 2010 albums — the experimental rock album Rebirth (772,000 copies sold) and the post-prison release I Am Not a HumanBeing (953,000 ) — were mere appetizers.
“It’s almost like those other albums were retail mixtapes used … to keep him out there in the streets and in people’s minds,” says Creekmur, who adds that the emergence of rappers Drake and Nicki Minaj on Lil Wayne’s Young Money Entertainment label fueled his popularity. “Those guys are right under Lil Wayne in terms of notoriety and sales. He’s created this frenzy over Carter IV that we haven’t seen in a long time.”
