Eminem’s ‘Recovery’ Goes Platinum
Eminem‘s latest album Recovery has achieved the near-impossible by going platinum in just two weeks. On this week’s Billboard charts, Eminem racked up sales of 313,000 copies of the LP, pushing the grand total to 1.1 million. “With Recovery, we get the raw, smart, witty and clever Eminem that led us to realize in 1999 that this guy is the real,” Violet Brown, Director of Urban Music at Transworld Entertainment, tells Rsolling Stone. “Everyone was waiting for this moment to reappear and he brought it.” By comparison, it took Eminem’s Relapse four weeks in 2009 to cross the platinum mark, and considering Relapse was that year’s top-selling hip-hop release, Recovery is well on its way toward being 2010’s best-selling rap album.
Read Rolling Stone‘s four star review of Recovery .
Other big sales this week included Drake’s Thank Me Later (105,000 copies in three weeks) and a 69-percent sales spike in the Twilight Saga: Eclipse soundtrack, which moved 65,000 copies and rose Number 10 last week to Number Three on the chart. Only two debuts cracked this week’s Top 10: The-Dream’s third LP Love King entered at Number Four with 58,000 copies sold and 3OH!3’s Streets of Gold bowed at Number Seven with 41,000 copies.
Despite Eminem’s big week, overall sales of were still down 20 percent compared to the same week in 2009. 2010’s total albums sold (154 million) also trail 2009’s up to this point in the year (172.9 million) by 11 percent.