Did you know…
…that the best selling album of 2008 - Tha Carter III from Lil’ Wayne – sold 2.88 million copies and
for the very first time since tracking album sales started under the current model in 1991, the number-one album didn’t clear 3 million copies (mediapost.com)
… but still, Lil’ Wayne alone…
sold more CDs than did CD Baby in 2008 (coolfer)
…which is interesting if you know that CD Baby has 277,000 Albums in stock. Does that mean that the Long Tail is a dead end? I doubt. Look at this:
Songs from Regina Spektor, an album that is available only from CD Baby has 2,257,765 plays from 161,533 listeners on last.fm, which is roughly the same as the 2,466,466 plays from 116,056 listeners for Lil’ Waynes’ Tha Carter III.
How come? Do Lil’ Wayne listeners use less computers? Are Regina Spektors’ fans a bunch of file sharing criminals? Or maybe – are the „official” sales numbers just a massive fake?
That’s partly because the Last.fm plays are split between „Lil Wayne” and „Lil’ Wayne”. Not a great comparison.