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Originally Posted by louder
Eminem actually went from 800,000 with Marshall Mathers LP 2 to this. Yeezus did 320,000 and To Pimp a Butterfly did 320,000 too. That was all before the streaming era, nowadays the numbers are actually higher due to equivalent sales. DAMN did 600,000 first week (on a side note, it has gone double platinum since and is the highest selling album of the year, all genres included). 4:44 was only available for streaming on TIDAL during its first week and still sold the equivalent of 260,000 copies.
250,000 would be great for almost every other rapper, but for an established pop star like Eminem this is really bad. He's lost most of his fan base and since this album is being received so poorly I don't think he'll even be here for another album.
We officially live in an era where Kendrick, Kanye and Hov are all more popular than Eminem.
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I guess I’m mis-remembering about Yeezus’ first-week sales. I thought Ye had been hovering around the 100-150,000 mark for the last few releases. My bad if that’s not true. And I thought MMLP2 sold 700,000-something. ?? But yeah, Kendrick annihilated with DAMN., but TPAB didn’t go platinum until late 2015/early 2016, when streams were counted toward sales. Yeah it sold 300,000-plus in its first week, but it then sat around that same level for the better part of a year, and had only gone gold before the streaming bump launched it suddenly into plat-stat.
I consider 100,000 to be a solid #1 actually, because in 2017, it is. But yeah, Eminem has fallen quite far. He’s the only rapper to release more than one album that went platinum in its first week (Marshal Mathers LP, Eminem Show), and even in the twilight of his career he was still scoring big hits and selling around the 400,000 mark with his awful Relapse crap.
But to say he’s “less popular” than Kanye and Kendrick is maybe a stretch. I get. A lot of my info on millennual culture from some folks I work with. They’re 23-25 and becauze they share office space with ME, we end up taking music a lot. One of them just got into Kendrick last month. Like, just listened to something other than “Don’t Kill my Vibe” for the first time ... last month.
Another one thought Kendrick Lamar was a football player, as of the release of DAMN. (which is pretty pathetic).
They know a ton of Kanye songs because most people do. But they all still thoroughly believe Eminem is the best rapper of all time, and think it’s ridiculois to suggest that this isn’t the case. They now know about Kendrick, and they know about Kanye, and they stream both artists’ hits, but they identify with Eminem. Eminem *is* rap to these white middle-class millennials who were, like, five years old when he came out.
And Em’s influence runs deep in America. Even if his new shit isn’t selling very well, there’s this trilogy of albums that many mainstream music fans have on a pedestal. Slim Shady, Marshal Mathers and Eminem Show. For a while he was the biggest musician on the planet, and even if he’s drying up, he’s a legend to a lot of people.
We have to acknowledge that. He’ll occupy an Elvis-like space in rap, where closed-minded thinkers imagine him as the alpha and omega for a very long time.