Just before he released his new album, The Carter IV, Lil’ Wayne said that he hoped more artists would follow his creative strategy in the future. The strategy was to release the album on iTunes seconds following MTV’s VMA Awards and, it worked. So well in fact that Lil’ Wayne might get his wish, and we might see more of these types of releases in the future.

The rapper did face some obstacles in getting his latest album released online; the main one being that some of the album was leaked on the Internet before it was actually released. But that did nothing to stop sales, as The Carter IV sold 300,000 downloads in just four days. That’s 10,000 more than Kanye‘s and Jay-Z‘s Watch the Throne, which was released last month and only sold 290,000 downloads in the same amount of time.

But Watch the Throne wasn’t the only album The Carter IV beat, it broke records too, and Lil’ Wayne holds the current record! Before The Carter IV, the most sales in the first week of release was The Carter III, which Wayne released in 2008. The Carter IV is expected to sell 850,000 copies in its first week; official sales results will be released this Wednesday.

There’s no doubt that with numbers like those, more artists will be sure to follow in Lil’ Wayne’s footsteps and plan for more creative and publicity-inducing release dates.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Concerts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.