There's two ways of looking at the roughly 350,000 units Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly moved in its first week.
The optimistic take is that's a really good number in this day and age. The harsher read is that it's a lot less than Drake was able to do last month, and not even close to the million his label TDE seemed to be gunning for.
A tweet that K.Dot sent out and erased late last night suggests that he is in the latter camp.
As Billboard points out, the 35,000 of TPAB sales in K.Dot's hometown of LA are actually the most of any city. This is significant because New York (being larger) is usually the city with the most rap album sales.
So maybe something else is bothering K.Dot, too ...
TPAB is projected to move about 140,000 more copies in its second week. So it is clearly far from being a flop.
But given all the hype and promise of the project, it's starting to look like it's not going to quite meet commercial expectations. And while the initial critical reaction has been strong, we're not sure this one is going stand out a year from now -- like K.Dot's previous album 2012's Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City has been able to.
What do you think?
Update: Its seems like all of TDE was freaking out about K.Dot's LA sales: