Arts & Culture Half million sold in first week for Jay-Z
July 25, 2013
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Jay-Z’s new album has sold more than 500,000 units its first week.
Nielsen SoundScan said late Tuesday preliminary data shows that “Magna Carta Holy Grail” moved about 527,000 copies. It will debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart this week.
The album was officially released on July 7. Samsung bought and gave 1.2 million copies of the album to Galaxy mobile phone users on July 4. Billboard is not counting those sales on its charts.
“Magna Carta” has the second-best first-week debut of the year after Justin Timberlake’s “20/20 Experience.” The album features Timberlake, Beyonce, Frank Ocean and Timbaland.
Jay-Z’s 12th album had more than 14 million streams in its first week on Spotify, beating a record that Daft Punk set in May with “Random Access Memories.”