You have a disgruntled artist who is doing well in spite of his perceptions about his label, and you have the label which can accurately forecast sales, but seems unsure about how to promote the artist. Then again, I don’t remember a ton of hype over his other album.Īrticles like this do serve to show just how confusing the music industry really is. Since he is signed to a major label he does have a certain expectation of promotion since that’s the function of the label. The only part of his rant that has any real substance is the bit about promotion. Kid CuDi apologizes for not being able to find the CD in stores as if most of his fan base isn’t using iTunes. So even though Cary Sherman is a moron, it does seem that the labels still have some idea of how to forecast sales. I’m not sure how many of that 66k were physicals, but it seems like the label was actually in the ballpark on sales forecast. They shipped 55k physicals and he sold 66k. “Ok so just a heads up, my weak ass label only shipped 55k physicals cuz they treated this like some indie side project tax right off.” Maybe, if they’d put a little faith in their own artist, they could have had a #1 on their hands.įiled Under: kid cudi, labels, music, promotion, wzrdĬompanies: universal music, universal republic It seems the legacy gatekeepers aren’t quite as good at curation as they think-at least I bet Universal is wishing they’d gotten a few more copies of WZRD out there, and put some promotional weight behind the project. This is especially funny in the wake of RIAA CEO Cary Sherman’s recent interview, in which he claimed record labels were needed to “separate the wheat from the chaff” and “designate who is worth promoting and marketing”. who mad? not me and So its def gonna be tough to find one in the stores guys, I’m sorry about that.Īpparently fans were prepared to make the effort, because WZRD debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. They tried to rush me thru this so i can just give em another MOTM, but guess what? Fuck that, next album is WZRD. And I apologize for the lack of promo, again, my weak ass major label. So i apologize on behalf of my weak ass major label.
Ok so just a heads up, my weak ass label only shipped 55k physicals cuz they treated this like some indie side project tax right off. After the release, CuDi took to Twitter to vent: That’s the kind of thing that makes big record labels nervous (they’d prefer artists just keep churning out variations on their first success) and CuDi’s label Universal Republic was no exception. Last week we wrote about WZRD, the new album from KiD CuDi on which he went in an entirely different direction from his usual style.