West’s New Album Will Approach 500k, as Guns (300k), Ludacris (225k) and The Killers (200k) All Trail

November 26, 2008

Kanye’s the king of Thanksgiving week.
West's Roc-a-Fella/Def Jam album, 808s and Heartbreak, in which he tackles the Auto-Tuner and his own inner demons, will be #1 on next Tuesday’s chart with a total that looks to be between 450-500k.

That’ll be more than enough to beat back Axl Rose and his first Guns N’ Roses album in some 15 years, Chinese Democracy, which will move around 300k, more or less, out of Best Buy outlets. And that’s including the 25k or so not counted opening week at iTunes for the Sunday release.

Ludacris’ Island Def Jam album, Theater of the Mind, looks good for 225k, followed by the other one of IDJ’s big holiday power trio, The Killers’ Day and Age, clocking in with 200k more or less.

Finally, what would the turkey shoot be without Barry Manilow? The "Copacabana" guy scores 85k for his new Arista/RMG album, The Greatest Songs of the Eighties, thanks to huge QVC sales.

Coldplay’s Prospekt’s March EP on Capitol will chalk up between 75-80k, while Capitol Nashville’s Trace Adkins appears headed for the 40-45k area for his new album, X.

After some Monday confusion over release dates (all three major circulars advertised the IDJ albums coming on Tuesday), the numbers seem back to normal.

Meanwhile, the market was up 6% vs. last week, down 32% vs. same week last year and now down 14% year to date. Feels like a tryptophan hangover even before the turkey is served.

In today's music business 300k debut is nothing to sneeze at.

As far as GnR goes - no matter how pumped the release was has anyone really bought into the hype? Chinese Democracy was laughed at year by year for various reasons and when the leaks came it was laughed at how bad they were...

If it’s just another batch of demos, then they’re perhaps the most well-produced and complete demos in the history of the industry. And damn, they’re really pretty good.

We’ve Got Chinese Democracy, And It’s Worth The Wait.

No.

Rolling Stone



AntiQuiet



BTW, those are just the top 2 results when I googled "Chinese Democracy 9 track leak".

And a couple of posts above you were saying that 300k was a good number, so, yeah, some people did buy into the hype, just not enough

It wasn't just an urban legend -- Axl really was working on something (but "overworking something" is more accurate). It's good to hear Rose's signature yowl, but the attempt at compositional and "modern" eclecticism via added electronics and the like sink it.

For the most part they sound as you'd expect songs a decade and a half in the making to sound: fussy, over-produced, painfully tentative. You can almost hear the panic in Axl's voice: "Is this any good? Have I still got it? Can I release this? Should I just hit 'delete' and start the whole thing again?"

In general, the album feels like an unfocused patchwork of anachronistic musical styles. With all the hype and expectation built up over 14 years, it was not unreasonable to expect a masterpiece, and while there are certainly some moments on this alleged record that stand up to some of Axl's earlier output, the result is primarily a collection of incoherent false starts.

I bought "The Essential" the other day. I didn't think it was possible to find one in stores.

Everyone should ban that Number Ones shit, though. It only has 3 (?) singles from Thriller, and has like 2038202 from Bad. It should be the other way around.

Yeah, it's unfortunate there weren't more #1's off Thriller. Bad rode the success of Thriller to most its #1 singles. Due to the #1's theme of the disc they had to follow the discs strict "#1 in the UK or USA" policy.

Though if I recall...some of the "Thriller" singles didn't even go #1, nor the Invincible singles (lol...Invincible )