Nicki Minaj can add a third gold plaque to her growing collection of hardware. The extra piece comes because the "Anaconda" rapper's latest album The Pinkprint has continued a steady stream of sales and eclipsed the golden 500,000 mark, making it RIAA certified gold in the United States.
According to Billboard, The Pinkprint sold another 22,000 copies in the week ending Feb. 15, pushing the total album sales past 500,000 to 509,000. This is Minaj's third gold album of three, following Pink Friday and its follow-up Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, which have sold 1.93 million copies and 905,000 copies to date.
The total unit figure are represented by the new metric that includes pure album sales, track equivalent albums and streaming equivalent albums.
The gold certification has been a long time coming since the LP moved 244,000 copies in its first week. Its second week sales pushed the album to 304,000 and it has slowly crept upward since then.
Though the album was released Dec. 12, 2014, and did not have time to rack up the sales during the year that other hip-hop albums did, its lower-than-expected sales was a good example of the poor sales that we saw from hip-hop albums during 2014. The trend was seen all across music as well with only Taylor Swift going platinum with an album released in 2014.
J. Cole was managed to go gold in his second week with 2014 Forest Hills Drive with one of the most heralded albums of the year.
There is hope for hip-hop in 2015 with highly anticipated LPs from Big Sean, Drake, Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar on the horizon. Drake's official mixtape If You Are Reading This It's Too Late shot to the top of the charts with about 500,000 sales in the first week and broke his own Spotify record in the process for most streams in the first week without having a full week to do it.
