Hip Hop Album Sales: Week Ending 3/23/2014

Following its release just over a week ago on March 18, YG’sMy Krazy Life debut rose to the #2 spot this week on the Billboard Top 200 chart. Lower on the list, Pharrell Williams and Rick Ross both experienced single digit rankings drops from fifth and third to #6 and #7, respectively, for their albums G I R L and Mastermind. After making his Top 200 debut last week at #4, Aloe Blacc’sLift Your Spirit album dropped down to #19, a couple spots above John Legend’sLove In The Future, which has remained on the charts for just shy of 30 weeks. Meanwhile, ScHoolboy Q’s fourth week on the list finds him dropping from #15 last week to #29 with his Oxymoronalbum.

YG’s My Krazy Life Debuts At #2

Selling just over 60,000 units in its first week on shelves, YG’s My Krazy Life displaced Pharrell Williams at the #2 spot. The Def Jam debut, which features production from DJ Mustard and a feature from Kendrick Lamar, is YG’s first time on the charts. Earlier this week, the rapper talked about the release in an interview with Hot 97, saying “it’s easy to make a classic album.” “Yeah, it just take time,” YG said. “I feel like if you give a nigga stories and all that on your album and it’s really like—no matter if it blow. Like Jay Z first album’s a classic, but it didn’t sell a lot…If you giving stories and it’s realistic like people feel it. And like ‘He ain’t lying.’ That’s a classic.”

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While on the show, YG also credited Jeezy for giving him artistic freedom on the album. “As far as the music, he let me do my thing,” YG said. “You feel me? Like he come in. He give me advice. But when I link up with him it was never a problem with the music…Just making the right moves and connecting with the right person. Cause I was on the West Coast. It was hard. It was hard for me on this side and the South. But then when I link up with Jeezy we start working. We did the mixtape, the ‘My Nigga’ record. Shit started clicking. And then he was at the label. Doing his stuff and going hard for me.”

Pharrell Williams’ G I R L Falls To #6 & Rick Ross’ Mastermind Drops To #7

During its third week on the charts, Pharrell Williams’ second studio album, G I R L, sold just shy of 35,000 units, a nearly 25 percent drop from last week, and fell one spot to #6. To date, Williams has sold 192,000 copies of the record, which received a 3.5 out of a possible 5 in HipHopDX’s recent review. “While G I R L is too surface-level at times, it hits the target it’s aimed for,” DX wrote. “Pharrell wants summertime airplay, and any of these songs could survive on the radio. It’s also a nice tribute to feminine vigor, adding another notch to Pharrell’s ever-growing list of achievements. He has plenty to be happy about these days.”

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Directly beneath the “Happy” star, Rick Ross sold 27,000 copies of his Mastermind album, pushing him over the quarter-million sales mark after three weeks on the list. Ross, who sold nearly 50,000 albums last week, debuted at #1 on the charts for the fifth time in his career with Mastermind. His 2010 release, Teflon Don, is his only major-label release to not reach the top spot on the charts.

Aloe Blacc’s Lift Your Spirit Lands At #19 & Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP 2 At #27

Experiencing a double-digits ranking drop from last week, Emanon emcee Aloe Blacc’s Lift Your Spirit fell from the fourth spot to #19 in its second week on the chart. Blacc’s Lift Your Spirit sold a little less than 15,000 copies this week, a 67 percent drop from last week’s numbers, and has now totaled over 60,000 albums sold.

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Eminem, who passed the 2 million albums sold mark last week for his Marshall Mathers LP sequel, sold nearly 13,000 copies of MMLP2 this week, earning him his twentieth week on the charts for this particular album. Elsewhere, Em’s Eminem Show clocked enough sales, with 3,226 sold this week, to crack into the Top 200 at #116.

ScHoolboy Q’s Oxymoron At #29 & Young Money’s Rise Of An Empire Drops To #36

After debuting as the most streamed album of the year on Spotify earlier this month, ScHoolboy Q’s major label debut, Oxymoron, fell from the #15 spot last week to #29 this week. Having sold 12,224 copies of the record this week, Q’s total numbers inched closer to the 200,000 mark. ScHoolboy Q’s Oxymoron album received a 3.5 out of 5 in its recent HipHopDX review. “In many ways, Oxymoron delivers exactly as advertised,” HipHopDX says in its album review. “It’s an ominous project that also needs a few radio reaches to provide ScHoolboy Q a platform to achieve mainstream success.”

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At the same time, the Young Money compilation Rise Of An Empire fell nearly 30 spots from its debut at #7 to its current standing at #36. The album, which experienced a 66 percent drop in sales in that time period, sold 10,569 copies this week after selling 31,490 copies in its first week.

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib Enter The Charts At #39 With Pinata

With 9,299 albums sold in its first week on shelves, Freddie Gibbs and Madlib debuted on the charts at #39 this week with their album Pinata. The album, which received HipHopDX’s highest rating of the year thus far with a 4.5 out of 5, was released on the producer’s Madlib Invazion label and features artists like Scarface, Raekwon and Danny Brown. “As Gangster Rap, Piñata is free of conceptual pretense; it’s a slice more than a thesis,” HipHopDX wrote. “It’s also a new benchmark for Gibbs and may end up as a career calling card. If nothing else, it quickly sounds like one of the year’s best.”

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