The last superstar? 21st century music promotion with Lil Wayne

I just had to look into this situation with Lil Wayne when I heard he had sold a million records in his first week.



I’m pretty sure he could be the only artist to have achieved this in the last year or so.

Not kanye, not fitty.



This could make Lil Wayne the last superstar. He may be the last artist to ever sell a million albums in a week - remember the biggest selling album of 2007 was Josh Groban's Christmas album, Noel which sold 3.6 million albums IN TOTAL, selling 670,000 copies per week at it's peak.



My interest in the charts is purely professional so I didn’t know a lot about Lil Wayne except of course his notorious mixtape sessions.





Checking out his new single “Lollipop” which no doubt is being thrashed around the world right now and is the track of choice for drunken middle class 17 year olds I didn’t see or hear anything remarkable when say held against something similarly huge such as 50 cents smash hit debut “In Da Club”



But of course you probably haven’t heard this song, and you may not have heard the recent collaboration between Timbaland and One Republic “Apologize” which was the most played radio song ever.



Because that’s the way the internet and new media works. If in the 21st century, you don’t care, then you don’t have to. Remember with the internet there's always another channel where somethjing better is on.

I mean - Heard Madonna’s new album? Well actually . . . no one cares. I used to love “get into the groove” when I was a little kid!!! Lets hear that one again. And I think that's how people feel.





I won’t go into too much I’ll just make some points:



- Lil Wayne was a gifted student who went to a special learning school. At 11 he was picked up by a mentor and released his first album at 15. His first solo album in 1999 at the age of 17 was a massive success in Hip Hop.



- Lil Wayne has been largely known since then for his prolific mixtape series of improvised recordings that have been distributed widely over then net through filesharing. As the DJ mixtape tradition is somewhat dubious in the face of traditional copyright law, there was no way he could have profitted dramatically from this phenomenon anyway.



- In 2003 Lil Wayne guested on a Destiny’s Child track “Soldier” that was #1 hit in the US and several other countries. From that point Lil Wayne began a prolific period of guest appearances in 2006 alone he guest featured on 87 tracks.



So what we’re saying here is that although his 2002 and 2005 albums were relatively unsuccessful, selling less than a million copies of each while taking 3 years to complete, the phenomenal exposure he has got on the internet through creating access to large amounts of free music and the exposure he's got from mainstream media piggybacking on every opening to maintain his presence with new content has seen him set himself up to be the only artist on the planet who we can be sure could sell a million records in a week in 2008.

What has Lil Wayne done thats different? Whether he's "worked harder" than other artists is not the point - it's that in a changing market he has adapted by presenting a LOT more content than would otherwise be expected of a top selling artist - maybe only 3 official albums in 9 years but hundreds of featured appearances and dozens of unofficial full length recordings.

ALSO musically, Lil Wayne has leverage the key skill that he does possess - improvised raps or "freestyles" and has flown in the face of traditional copyright to create something of value for fans and although he was unable to profit directly, the profit came when the fans rewarded him by buying a million of his albums.