Prince’s much ballyhooed posthumous album, “Welcome 2 America,” was mostly unwelcome sales wise.
Despite a weird segment on “60 Minutes,” the album engendered little excitement. Total sales for the week including streaming came to just 60,000 copies. Of those, only 37K were paid downloads and CDs.
Sort of everything here was done wrong. But what I don’t understand is why the people involved didn’t release the track, “Hot Summer,” three weeks ago when were having a blazing hot summer. It’s a great single, perfect for radio, jingles, promotions. They had a marketing bird in the hand and did nothing with it.
Instead, we got the title track, which was kind of meh, and another one called “Born 2 Die,” which was a downer. The album actually has four or five strong, up beat songs that could have really blown up.
Plus, it probably doesn’t matter, but the track sequencing on that album is miserable. There’s no build up as you go through it. There’s no launching place. But of course, only old people listen to an album in order, even for a few minutes per track. So this is a moot point.
If the regular priced CD only sold 37,000 copies I wonder what happened to all the special editions. I guess we’ll see them floating around amazon and ebay.
