
You got to love the internet, it's the most efficient distributor of completely incorrect information ever invented. Case in point, the "Wiz Khalifa only sold 6,000 copies of 'Rolling Papers' in his first week!!!" rumors that are currently exploding on the interwebs. When I first heard them I thought, there's absolutely no way that's true, and after a little research it turns out that...yeah...um...they're completely bullshit.
First, here's the source everyone seems to be referring to, a chart compiled by HitsDailyDouble (yeah, me neither). All you really know is it's a site that attempts to predict sales numbers, not SoundScan, which is the official report that comes out each Wednesday.
Just look at it!!! Oh my god, Wiz only sold 6,000!!! For half a second I believed it to, but then I looked a little bit closer. The first thing I noticed is all the numbers above it. Wait, Britney's got the number one album in the country with 139K? Followed by "Now That's What I Call Music" with 17K? And Chris Brown's "F.A.M.E." dropped from number one to number six in one week, losing about 200,000 units in the process? Last week the number 17 album in the country was Rihanna's "Loud" with 25K, and now it's Wiz with 6K? That's got to be crazy talk. So I went back to last week's official album charts:
Yeah...so either the music industry has the most cataclysmic week in history, with albums rising and dropping faster than a stripper's booty at Magic City and sales at apocylyptic levels, or the chart everyone's freaking out about is completely wrong. Of course, then I looked even closer and saw that there's a note on the first chart that reads "Now In: 37%". In other words, the chart makers only have 37% of the total number to base their estimations on.
Hey, how about the next time before we completely freak out we actually read the thing we're freaking out about? Yeah, your'e right. That's way too much to ask. Rest assured, tomorrow I'll post some legit sales numbers, and I fully expect Wiz to do over 200K.
Until then....