Lil Wayne sets new record

Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III becomes the first album in more than three years to sell a million copies in a week. The opus sold 1,006,000 copies to debut at #1 on Nielsen/SoundScan's list of the best-selling albums in the U.S. That's the biggest sales week since another rap album, 50 Cent's The Massacre, bowed at #1 in March 2005 with sales of 1,141,000.

Frankly, I was starting to think that the days of albums selling a million copies in a week were gone forever. Rascal Flatts didn't even come close in 2006 when Me And My Gang opened with sales of 722,000. Even the red-hot Kanye West fell short when his latest, Graduation, bowed in 2007 with sales of 957,000. And those were the biggest one-week sales totals for those years. Until this week, the heftiest tally for 2008 was less than half of West's total. Mariah Carey's E=MC2 had held the record for 2008 with sales of 463,000.

It's telling that while the industry focused on media-anointed superstars (Madonna, Usher) in searching for someone who might be able to top Carey's record, it was broken by a rapper with a fraction of their media profile.

This is Lil Wayne's sixth top 10 album, but his first to reach #1. The rapper, who was born Wayne Carter, first hit the chart in 1999, when he was 16. Lil Wayne is the third artist to hit #1 so far this year who first cracked the Billboard album chart as a teenager. Janet Jackson was also 16 when she first charted in 1982. Usher was just 15 when he first charted in 1994.

This is Lil Wayne's third album in the Tha Carter series. That's not so unusual: Jay-Z's In My Lifetime stretched to three volumes, while Johnny Cash released five albums in his American Recordings series. But what is unusual is that each of Lil Wayne's Tha Carter albums has charted higher than the one before it. Tha Carter hit #5 in 2004. Tha Carter II reached #2 in 2005.

We all know that downloading of individual songs is on the upswing, and that CD sales are in decline, but consider this: Tha Carter III sold more than twice as many copies this week as any song has ever sold in any one week in digital downloads. The all-time weekly (and overall) digital champ, "Low" by Flo Rida Featuring T-Pain, sold 467,000 downloads the last week of December.