While driving to lunch yesterday, I ran into an NPR special (see link above) on the rapper everyone loves to hate, Lil Wayne. The podcast delivered by veteran music critic Robert Christgau examines Wayne’s marketing strategy for Carter III, his speedy rise to hip-hop dominance, as well as his ability to redefine the game by turning conventional wisdom on its head. I have 2 major points disagreement with Christgau’s piece.
The essay credits the success of Carter III, which sold 1 million copies in its debut week, largely to Wayne’s market saturation and extraordinary work ethic.
“Tha Carter III‘s first-week sales, which were easily pop’s strongest since Kanye West’s Graduation last September, were spurred by a daring marketing strategy that doubled as a cocky musical challenge. In the two-and-a-half years between major-label releases, Lil Wayne whetted his fans’ appetites by giving away more songs than anyone can count.”
Christgau has been writing about music since way before I was in Underoos, so I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. But according to this other theory which has been around long before Christgau, “if one factor of production is increased while the others remain constant, the overall returns will relatively decrease after a certain point.” Thus, if Wayne decides to drop 500 songs in one year, he’ll see a decrease in demand for his product. Now, the law of diminishing returns can be beaten in some extremely rare cases. This isn’t one of them.
As 50 Cent will tell you, no artist can boast of having a monopoly on popularity. Just a few years ago, anything 50 touched turned into gold (or platinum). But now that 50 and his G-Unit cronies have saturated the airwaves with their music, good and bad (mostly bad in the post Game-and-Buck days), enthusiasm for their brand has declined drastically. Hell, Lil Wayne’s 4th week numbers even eclipsed G-Unit’s 1st, but that’s a story for another blog post.
What’s Wrong with This Picture?
My other problem with the essay is that it flatly assumes that Lil Wayne got to the 1 million sold mark simply on the strength of quality music and market saturation. So, all you have to do is create good music and churn out as many collaborations as possible to sell 1 million records? If that was the case, Bun B’s latest album should be selling like hotcakse. By that same logic, Detox should have trouble moving units since Dre has been relatively inactive for the past 50 years.
I’ve seen many theories on why Tha Carter III is as big as it is, and this is definitely not the worst of them. The chart pushers at Billboard even attributed C3‘s success to iTunes’ “Complete My Album” program, which allows customers to turn individual tracks into a complete album at a reduced price by giving them full credit for every track previously purchased from that same album. So if you bought “Lollipop” and “A Milli” 2 weeks before Carter III‘s official release, you were only required to pay for the remaining 14 tracks.
I’m sure that had something to do with Tha Carter III‘s commercial success. As did Wayne’s gazillion collaborations. But there were certainly other contributing factors, including:
- Universal’s decision to waive penalties for returned CDs
- Inflated numbers to fuel the hype (it’s not a question of if they bought any, it’s a question of how many copies were self-purchased)
- Unprecedented amount of pre-orders from retail stores
- Overall anticipation for the album
- His ability to woo newer fans, while alienating old ones
There’s a host of other primers at play here, but the most important thing to note is that “quality content” isn’t one of them.
Related Posts:
Carter III Not As Popular As 1st-Week Sales Indicated
1 Million and Running
[Huge props to smokeYYY for the Wayne pic]
Pingback: Lil Wayne: o protótipo do artista do século XXI? | Remixtures