Cordae is unfazed by the fact his recent album The Crossroads had first-week sales of around 10k and does not consider that a “flop” by any means.
During an interview with The Breakfast Club on Wednesday (December 18), Charlamagne Tha God read a review of the November release that called it a “flop,” and asked Cordae if he agreed.
“No. Because, probability of that, it’s [written by] some white boy in Indiana,” he replied. “Not that it’s a race thing, but it’s the truth of the people that run those. If you look at channels like that, their whole channel subscribes to a bunch of negativity. That’s what they’re about. Every artist in music, you can find something negative and nitpick at where they lack in some department.”
He continued: “But no, [I don’t think it flopped] because I had other albums that didn’t have a strong first week but again, my tour ended up doing super well. And then later on it grows and becomes a larger thing. Why spend all this time focusing on one week? You’re focusing on one week when there’s 52 weeks out of the year? You’re gonna just gonna give up on an album because it didn’t have a super strong first week?
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“I think I get compared to mega stars. If you compare a Cordae first week sales to a like a Kendrick Lamar first week, of course there’s a discrepancy. But when it comes to my actual peers that do the type of music that I do, we have the same comparative numbers. Even though comparison is the thief of joy, but that’s a whole other perceptive. But yeah, I have no worry about what some white man said about my career.”
Prior to the effort’s release, Cordae was nonplussed about how it would land commercially.
Taking to X, he said: “Want to say this now I don’t give 1 fuck about a first week sale. It’s a very inaccurate way to calculate impact, especially with the current streaming metrics. I seen somebody do 11K first week and then do a ARENA TOUR off the same album. That’s the end of my Ted talk *2nd one.”
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Cordae added: “N-ggas said my last project first week numbers wasn’t good and I ended up doing a sold out headline world tour….”
He continued his point: “In the 90/2000s music was consumed by people actually going to the stores and buying albums. When you did 100K first week that meant 100 thousand people went and bought the cd. Now you can have 300,000 people Listening to your album on streaming, and the units Equivalent is 200.”
He concluded by saying: “Whole point is let’s stop making music about numbers and money, it’s killing something that’s so pure.”
Cordae’s first two albums received a muted commercial reception with both projects stalling at number 13 on the Billboard 200.
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Neither album topped 25,000 equivalent sales in a week and have yet to receive any certification from the RIAA.
