Lil Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Carter Jr., has not put out an official album since 2005, but he has kept the attention of fans by releasing mixtapes and rapping on dozens of songs by stars like Usher and Chris Brown. Hip-hop has been hit especially hard, with sales declining about 25 percent this year compared with the same period in 2007. The last time an album broke the million barrier was in 2005, when “The Massacre” by 50 Cent sold 1.1 million copies in its first week.Īs CD sales drop and popular tastes splinter, big debuts for hit albums are less common. The last album to come close to a million in its first week was Kanye West’s “Graduation,” which sold 957,000 copies in 2007. (Nielsen SoundScan will release final numbers Wednesday.) And although Lil Wayne is a household name only to hip-hop fans, his first-week sales are the best so far in 2008, surpassing those of Mariah Carey and Usher, better-known R&B artists whose new albums each sold about 450,000 copies in the first week. The album sold 423,000 copies on June 10, its day of release, according to Billboard, and industry executives predict that first-week sales will near one million. In a year when album sales have fallen by another 11 percent after years of declines, the ailing record labels received good news Wednesday: “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal Mo- town), the new album by the rapper Lil Wayne, looks to be a rare blockbuster hit.

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