'That was a cold marketing strategy,' Compton MC K.Dot says of Lil Wayne's VMA album push on 'RapFix Live.'
By Rob Markman, with reporting by Sway Calloway
Freddie Gibbs, Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock on "RapFix Live"
Photo: MTV News
Everyone is talking about Lil Wayne and his super successful first-week sales of Tha Carter IV.
On Wednesday (September 7), after news officially broke that Weezy had sold 964,000 copies of C4, — more than 300,000 of which were purchased digitally through iTunes — Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock and Freddie Gibbs sat on the "RapFix Live" couch and touched on Tunechi's win in the face of illegal online downloading.
"I think it's a great thing. First and foremost, the Internet — I have no negative [or] bad words about the Internet," Kendrick said. "When I was distributing my music locally in Compton, Gardena, Watts, I was stuck right there, I couldn't get the word to spread," he recalled of his California-area 'hoods.
Now, the young spitter is known worldwide — on the Web and beyond.
Although C4 leaked several days before it hit retail outlets on August 29, it didn't seem to affect the first-week tally too much. And this past summer, both Game and the Throne, like Wayne, debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums chart. So while some still moan and groan, blaming the Net for the music industry's overall sales slump, Kendrick points to Wayne, Game, Jay-Z and Kanye West as shining examples."It shows that people still support music and wanna go out there and buy, especially if it's good music," he said.
Birdman says Cash Money didn't purchase any copies of Carter IV
Jay Rock was equally impressed, especially considering that Wayne had to reestablish himself after serving an eight-month prison term in 2010.
"When the big homey told me Wayne sold a million records, I was like, 'Wow, that is big for him coming out of jail and everything; that's a good look,' " Rock said.
K. Dot noted the marketing strategy that had Wayne closing out the 2011 Video Music Awards, and then releasing his album digitally on iTunes right afterward. "That was a cold marketing strategy," he smiled.
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