
Lil Wayne’s ‘Tha Carter VI’ debuts at number two on Billboard 200
Lil Wayne released his new album Tha Carter VI on June 6th. During its impressive first week of charting, the New Orleans rapper’s 14th studio effort opened at number two on the Billboard 200 chart.
Tha Carter VI became Wayne’s 13th album to debut in the top 10, earning 108,000 units in week one. Of that figure, 73,000 were SEA units, equalling 97.06 million on-demand song streams, 34,000 were pure album sales, and 1,000 were TEA units.
In comparison, his last album, Funeral, debuted at number one in 2020 with 139,000 units, becoming his fifth number-one album.
Weezy’s Tha Carter album series started in 2004 with Tha Carter, which reached number five on the Billboard 200. After that came 2005’s Tha Carter II (number two), 2008’s Tha Carter III (number one), 2011’s Tha Carter IV (number one) and 2018’s Tha Carter V (number one). The latter album was released on his 36th birthday and sold 480,000 units.
Tha Carter VI was stacked with features, including Machine Gun Kelly, Big Sean, 2 Chainz, Kodak Black, Bono, BigXthaPlug, Jelly Roll, Andrea Bocelli, Wyclef Jean and Mannie Fresh. His sons, Kameron Carter and Lil Novi, also made appearances.
Ahead of the album, Wayne told Rolling Stone, “If there’s one thing about this album that’s different, it’s me approaching it like, ‘Man, what would I sound like on something with such and such?’ ”
Wayne recorded 30 tracks for the project with Wyclef, but cut the tracklist to 19. “You don’t know what’s going to pop out,” he said. “You going to probably do like eight songs [with Wyclef] because he’s going to keep flipping what you did on one [song] and make a whole [new] song out of that shit.”