West v. Jackson

Well, about 5 weeks ago (see Fantastic Day For Hip-Hop), I told you how both Kanye West and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson were dropping their respective albums on Tuesday September 11th. In case you were wondering how it turned out, I have the first estimates for you.

According to Billboard, projections from three major record label executives are predicting that Kanye's Graduation may sell 575,000 to 700,000 copies in the first week. These same projections estimate 50 Cent's Curtis may sell 500,000 to 600,000 in the first week.

The official "scorekeeper" for album sales is Nielsen SoundScan. The people at Nielsen have a new system in place called the "Building Chart" which gives an early look at the final weekly charts (official weekly tallies are posted on Sundays at midnight). "Building Chart" looks at a group of merchants that represent about 90% of the music merchant market.

According to "Building Chart", Graduation sold 437,000 copies on its first day, while Curtis sold 310,000 copies. On a related note, the 3rd highest sales position on Tuesday went to Kenny Chesney's Just Who I Am: Poets and Pirates which sold 107,000 copies on its first day.

Seems like Kanye is going to beat out 50 in first week sales. If Graduation ends up selling on the higher end of the 575,000 to 700,000 copies range, it may beat the 2007 record held by Linkin Park's Minutes to Midnight which sold about 623,000 copies in its first week.

Kanye West's last album, Late Registration (2005) sold about 860,000 copies in its first week while 50 Cent's last album, The Massacre (2005) sold 1.1 million the first week out. Earlier, 50 Cent had promised to give up on his solo rap career (and apparently focus on group rap and/or producing) if Kanye beat him out in the first week. 50 supposedly retracted those comments before this past Tuesday's official drop date. Prior to that, 50 had dropped the acronym "SSK" from the title of his album (now only called Curtis). "SSK" stood for SoundScan Killer.

By the way, that is Kanye's Bear (his logo) wearing Alain Milki see-through shades (which Kanye has been sporting for many of his recent performances and promotional events) in the upper left corner of this post.