Wale just dropped his 5th album,
Shine and it sold 25,000 copies first week. I consider this a flop for someone of Wale's status. This is the lowest first week sales of any Wale album since he dropped
Attention Deficit in 2009. His last album,
The Album About Nothing (2015), which I felt didn't do so good commercially at least sold 88,000 copies first week.
The way I see it is there are the three kings of the new school- J Cole, Kendrick Lamar, and Drake, and then you have Big Sean, and Wale who are top contenders for that top three position. So, for Wale to release an album and sell less than 50k copies first week is a big disappointment.
Below are three reasons why I feel the album flopped.
1. The J.Cole Diss (False Prophets)
J.Cole might just have seen that song as a way of getting to his friend (yea, they are still good friends to this day), but it did a lot of damage to Wale's career. In this day and age, majority of rap music listeners don't have minds of their own. Once these kids hear someone of authority, or the crowd say something is wack, they are riding with that automatically...and vice versa. J.Cole calling out Wale for not appreciating his fans and being a "false prophet" registered in the minds of the rap music buyers (who are predominantly kids under 18 by the way) that Wale is 'not cool,' and no one wants to be uncool. So, they see the Wale CD in the store, or on ITunes, and just ignore it.
2. Bad Timing
How would you go ahead and drop a CD two weeks after Kendrick Lamar dropped the biggest album of his career.
Damn is not necessarily Kendrick Lamar's best, but Kendrick is at his peak right now, and this is Kendrick Lamar season. These kids don't care about anything else but Kendrick right now. Even the king of sales, Drake is not selling as much as Kendrick right now, so Wale would be worse affected by the Kendrick wave. He should have left the album release at the original date (5th of May), and then done a lot more promotion, instead of dropping the album a week early.
3. Bad Promotion
I don't know if he is having problems at Atlantic Records, but I feel they didn't do enough to promote this album. I didn't even know it was coming till the day it dropped. Plus, Wale didn't have a strong enough single that could carry the album;
PYT,
Running Back, and
Fashion Week with G-Eazy are all good songs, but they just didn't buzz enough to make people long for the album. Maybe if he had dropped the album around the time PYT was buzzing last year, he would have done better numbers.
"I don't know men! On the way here, I was in Time Square, and I saw Justin Skye on this Billboard, and I was like...I was like 'Wow!'" (The Breakfast Club Interview)
