Kendrick Lamar Tops Charts Again, Plus First Week Sales For Wale & Mary J. Blige

Wale Shine First Week Sales

Kendrick Lamar continues his reign at the top of the Billboard charts, moving 610k album equivalents sales for the week ending May 4th.  We also have the Wale Shine first week sales along with the numbers for the new Mary J. Blige album, Strength of a Woman.  Both projects performed below general expectations for the artists, but that’s today’s industry it seems.

While Kendrick Lamar has gone platinum after just 3 weeks with his DAMN. album, the Wale Shine first week sales might have him reconsidering everything he thought he knew about where he stood in the rap game.  Wale only moved 25k album equivalent units, only selling 13k copies in stores and making the rest off streams.  Fifteen albums performed better than him this week in Hip-Hop and R&B, including newcomer Playboi Carti who sold 28k album equivalent units.

The numbers are especially hard to swallow because Folarin moved his album up one week to release the project on April 28th instead of the initial projected release date of May 5th. The April 28th made for less mainstream competition, but the buzz was never really there for the new album so the Wale Shine first week sales really aren’t that surprising.

Wale’s last album, The Album About Nothing was a Billboard Number 1 album and sold 98k album equivalent units.

On to R&B, Mary J. Blige’s latest effort Strength of a Woman moved a respectable 76K album equivalent units, coming in 9th on the Hip-Hop and R&B charts.  The project was the highest R&B album on the chart this weeks so the Queen of Hip-Hop and R&B Soul is still doing her thing, all things considered, even though the sales aren’t quite what she’s been accustomed to.

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