Nelly blames record label for poor first-week sales

Posted at November 29, 2010 by Julie J Comments Off

Last week, Nelly’s sixth studio album 5.0 sold 64,000 copies in its first week, and he was not very happy about that.

So, in this day and age, he did what any other artist would do, and turned to twitter, which I don’t think is a very appropriate or professional way for any artist to deal with their issues, Nelly included. It’s just not a good look for them. Karen Civil compiled his letter in its entirety, so you can judge for yourself. Warning: it is not very grammatically correct. Maybe he’s using that “country grammar?”

Anyway, Nelly certainly makes some valid points, but it still doesn’t convince me in this day and age. His single “Just a Dream” sold two million units over two and a half months, and Nelly believes that such high single sales should translate into high album sales. He album dropped somewhere in between the new Kanye, Cudi, Nicki, and Rihanna (among many others), so personally, it doesn’t seem like Universal Motown chose the best quarter to stage a comeback for Nelly. Accordingly, it is not so farfetched that his single would outsell the album so much. I find it perfectly reasonable that people would want to cop, say, all those albums I listed, and just his single, but then again, I’m not much help because no, I wasn’t looking for Nelly, and I certainly didn’t care much for “Just a Dream” (that last line would make more sense if you decided to torture yourself by reading his grammatically incorrect letter).

Nelly also scolded his record label for only shipping out 200,000 physical copies, ultimately asking how they expected to sell copies if they were only shipping that much out, even though he sold 64k copies, and undoubtedly, digital downloads are included in that figure.

Spotted at HipHopDX