Kanye West outduels 50 Cent

By Steve Jones, USA TODAY

Kanye West won in a landslide in his face-off with fellow rapper 50 Cent. West's Graduation outsold his rival's Curtis 957,000 to 691,000 in the first week of release, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures.

The two discs topped Billboard's albums chart, followed by country star Kenny Chesney's Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates, which sold 387,000 copies.

Graduation's sales are the largest since 50 Cent's The Massacre opened with 1.1 million copies in March 2005 and the first album to surpass 800,000 since West's Late Registration sold 860,000 copies in August 2005. Graduation also set a first-week record with 133,000 digital downloads.

"It's a great day for hip-hop and for artistry because people in hip-hop emulate success," says Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, president and CEO of West's label, Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam. "It signals that with the right amount of attention and a credible album, there is still an interest in buying physical CDs."

Jay-Z says West got a boost in street credibility with defiant single Can't Tell Me Nothing. His Daft Punk-fueled Stronger did well on rhythmic and pop radio stations. Most reviewers favored Graduation over Curtis.

Despite all the attention leading up to the Sept. 11 releases, it was the quality of music, not the hype, that drove sales, says Island Def Jam chairman Antonio "L.A." Reid.

He says the date was chosen to take advantage of West's participation in MTV's Video Music Awards two nights earlier.

And while the rivalry got people talking, such pairings are unlikely to become routine.
Competition is "invigorating to the participants and to the spectators," Reid says. "But if people think this is a new way of releasing records, they are going to be sadly mistaken."

The public was fascinated in this case thanks to the outsized personalities of the controversial rappers. For weeks, the debate raged on radio, TV, magazines and blogs.

Early on, 50 Cent, who previously had outsold West by a wide margin, declared he would quit making solo records if he finished second. He has since backed off, saying he has another album in the works (Before I Self-Destruct) and blaming his label, Interscope Records, for not promoting Curtis well.

A new version of 50's hit I Get Money (Billion Dollar Remix), featuring Jay-Z and Diddy, was released Monday. "We're still competing, but we're not enemies," says Jay-Z.

This week's numbers were good news for the ailing record industry. West, 50 Cent and Chesney sold 2.04 million albums combined to surpass total sales for the previous week's top 200 albums (2 million). Still, overall sales are down 9% compared with the same week last year.