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KANYE WEST COMMENTS ON SALES VICTORY: Plus, 50 Cent concedes defeat after SoundScan releases final tally.
*It’s official. The final first week tally is in and Kanye West’s new album “Graduation” has beaten 50 Cent’s “Curtis” in a promotional sales competition by nearly 300,000 copies.
According to Nielsen SoundScan, West sold 957,000 copies to enter the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1 this week. 50 Cent lands at No. 2 on sales of 691,000 copies.
"To be a champion, you've got to take out a champion," West said Tuesday night at GQ's 50th anniversary party, where he rocked a celeb-filled crowd that included Jay-Z, Beyonce and Diddy cheering him on, according to the Associated Press. Moments later, he called for his "theme music," then launched into a performance of his currently single "Good Life."
"Graduation’s” sales performance also beat the year’s previous first-week victor, Linkin Park, which sold 623,000 of "Minutes to Midnight" when it debuted in May.
"It feels overwhelming," West told The Associated Press earlier in the day. "Everyone is coming up to me and telling me how proud they are of me."
This whole sales race was fired up when 50, whose album was originally scheduled to drop in June on Interscope Records, pushed his release date back to Sept. 11. Soon after, Def Jam decided to scrap the original release date of “Graduation” from late summer to Sept. 11 as well. West said it was all his idea to go directly against 50.
"I was the underdog because I sold less records in the past, so it was a win-win for me," he said. "If I lost, everyone would be happy that I even went up against him."
During the early part of the media-hyped sales race, 50 Cent said he would retire from the music business if West outsold him. Now that it has happened, the rapper’s attitude has changed.
"I am very excited to have participated in one of the biggest album release weeks in the last two years,” 50 said in a statement released to AP. Collectively, we have sold hundreds of thousands of units in our debut week. This marks a great moment for hip-hop music, one that will go down in history."
"The rivalry helped both of them," said Jay-Z, president of West's label Def Jam. "It was definitely one of those moments in the game that was exciting, everybody could pick a side and weigh in on and have an opinion ... it garnered a lot of attention."
Meanwhile, country star Kenny Chesney, whose new album "Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates" was also released on Sept. 11, sold 2.2 million copies, as did the previous No. 1 album “High School Musical 2,” placing third and fourth respectively.
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