Some good music yes, but Prince flopped it for personal reasons. Does it still have a chance? No.

So long Prince. I'll see you in vidies about your times when you weren't scared of success and rocked and had soul. Wake me up if we ever get back there.

Well, it has sold 3.0 million worldwide and went gold here domestically, I think. At least it was his first number one album since his 1989 soundtrack, Batman. I think 3121 should've been promoted a little more, because it was such a great album and I hope it gets a bigger chance in the future or even later this year.
[Edited 8/31/06 22:41pm]

Flop in what sense? 500,000k cd's sold is alot of cd's. The music on the cd is solid material. I don't consider it a flop at all. And when the tour starts it will sell even more. Flop, I don't think so.

I wouldn't consider a number 1 album a flop. Now if wasa number 31 or 21 on the charts, that would be a flop.

Bull said:

I agree .

And thats 500,000k in the US alone. It sold alot more overseas.

Bull said:

You know, I hear alot of people saying it sold this or that. I've seen with my own eyes, in every music store and place that might sell a Prince cd, 2-9 copies of 3121 with a Golden Ticket Lotto sticker on the package collecting dust. This tells me that someone assumed to sell X number of CDs by the date of the "Purple Ticketed" show. That is a goal that feel far short being that only 1 out of 7 CDed tickets were actually found by the date of the show. That can be consider in and of itself a flop.

My Dad, always had a saying Figures lie and liars Figure.

The album debuted at Number One on the Billboard Charts.

It reached Number One on the European Billboard Charts.

It is Gold in the USA, and is in excess of double platinum status in worldwide sales.

It is not a 'flop'.

NewMr7 said:

There once was a bull made of gold. It was said that bull could move moutians. When the time came for a moutian to be moved, the bull couldn't, and the people counting on that bull were crushed by the mountian. Yeah, the bull was made of gold, but it was still a bullshit flop.

MickG said:

Okay... now put down the crack pipe...

MickG said:

Well, a lot of figures are based on the number of CDs shipped to stores rather than actually bought. Although in a sense they have been 'bought' by the stores and that is all that matters to a record company. So yes, you can have a lot of CDs on shelves that have not actually been bought by individuals but have counted towards sales figures. However, it is the same for any artist, so Prince's sales figures are perfectly relative to any other artist, so it's still a good way to gauge relative success.

I'm not exactly sure, but in the US doesn't the Billboard chart use Soundscan figures, which are gathered when a CD is actually swiped over a record store counter? And Billboard/Soundscan had figures of just under half a million last time I checked months ago.

Another thing, 3121 was only available as a CD not a download, a lot of the other artists around Prince in the charts had both CDs and downloads counting towards the number of albums sold, so this surely must have kept Prince's sales figures back a bit. Not making the album available to download was a huge mistake, and of course the erratic promotion by Prince hasn't helped either. Musicology sold a million outright in the US, I think 3121 could easily have out-stripped that with proper involvement by Prince and even a small tour. No one knows exactly what Prince has been playing at this year, it is entirely possible he fell out with Universal, or problems with his relationship with Mani effected him, or even all his efforts to promote Tamar distracted him, but certainly he doesn't seem to have been quite behind this album like he was with Musicology, which is a shame but completely in character with the erratic decisions Prince has made throughout his career.

my guess is that prince had a falling out with universal and he did whatever he could to derail sales of 3121 for them without causing a major fuss or starting a whole "slave 2 the system" mess over again. i think the reason that's why he shifted focus away from 3121 and invested more time and energy into tamar - because she was just starting out and they had intended on being a package deal. when whatever went sour between prince and universal happened, i'm guessing prince felt tamar's career shouldn't have to suffer as a result so he funnelled all his promotional energies into her album...though we see how well THAT turned out.

i think if 3121 is a flop, it was made to be a flop on purpose. i also think that it's a strong enough album that prince will do more with the material, if only as a matter of pride...to show that universal might own the "product", but who truly owns the music and the concept? i think it will be repurposed, though in a touring situation, it's gonna be kind of weird to kick off a 3121 tour a year or so after it came out, especially with such dodgy promotion. it'll be interesting to see how (or if) he pulls it off.

MickG said:

-----
Well you and your dad need to take a look at overall CD sales this year. No one is selling a lot of music and considering it sold about 3 million outside of the U.S with very little promotion. It was not a flop.

I wish I could believe 3m+ worldwide sales but it seems too high.

From memorary 3121 only sold c35k copies in its first week in the UK and sales would have dropped off dramatically after this.

So if we assume 10x European countries selling about the same number that comes to a grand total of about c£350k copies. This is probably generous because I beleive the UK would normally sell more copies than other non-English speaking countries.

So with the US sales of about c450k - where were the other 2m+ copies sold??


PS how many copies did Musicology sell?
[Edited 9/1/06 5:19am]
[Edited 9/1/06 6:08am]

KAB said:

I've seen estimates of 1 million for the US for Musicology plus 500,000 rest of the world, not including the million concert giveaways.

I really don't see where this 3 million world-wide sales figure for 3121 comes from either. Somewhere around half-a-million only for the US, I don't see much more than that rest-of-the-world. The npgmc claimed it had sold 1.2 million a while before the npgmc went down, you would have to assume that was world-wide including the US and I don't see it suddenly selling a few million on top of that after that.

Now I would include Musicology concert sales and even go as far as to keep giving away Musicology albums for every subsequent tour as this is the only album that this can fully apply to. Musicology could return to the upper charts each year!!!

If someone could provide a rough breakdown of 3121 sales by country / continent then I'd more inclined to go with the 3m.

Like I said I'd be more than happy if 3m was correct because 3121 deserves to heard.

I've said it be4 and I will have 32 say it again;
in Europe the album got great reviews and sold well.
I was really surprised when I walked into a record store and
the cover of 3121(album size) was at nr 3!!!
I mean,I haven't seen a single P-album in the charts since Emancipation...
at nr 12!
I don't know why some poeple like 2 call 3121 a flop,is it because they don't like it???
I know Musicology did much better in the US,the tour was a great promotion,
but in Europe we didn't get a tour so it's easy 2 compare the succes of both albums here;Musicology draw the attention-3121 sold better.

I don't care how many copies this cd sold or what others think of it. I would rather listen to 3121 hundred times in a row than most of the shit I hear today. Christ, did you see the VMA's last night? What a f*cking mess that show was!

MartyMcFly said:

that ain't crack, that's ajax.

I don't understand how u can say this cd was a flop. It just doesn't make sense.

KAB said:

You obviously have somethimg called common sense. Statistics are often bandied around with little thought given to their accuracy. That's when a person has to use their common sense.In the UK it debuted at #9 then dropped massively. The total sales can't have been much more than 40,000 here. If people can convince themselves into believing figures like 3 million outside of the US then it speaks volumes about their ability to con themselves.

whoknows said:

Correction; 3 million including the US. Still a ludicrous figure.

whoknows said:

Agreed [the bit about me having common sense!!!!].

It did debut at #9, thanks I remember now. This isn't that bad but without any kind of promotion - remember the Brits, however much it was his best TV performance ever and certainly the best in a long while - was broadcast a month before and any momentum had been lost.

I remember both the singles Black Sweat and Fury in HMV in Birmingham were not on the stand near the door with all the other new releases that week. In other words only Prince fans knew it had been released and therefore any "passing trade" [probably not much for Prince singles, I grant you] would be minimal.

I'm afraid without this promotion from singles and /or Prince it cannot have sold 3m+.

But I still wish it had!!!

Paisley4u said:

I don't know what country you are in, but number 3 in itself means nothing, it could have been the first week and dropped out of the charts the next similar to what happened in the UK - you would have to supply the total sales in your country to date, not a one-off chart position. The UK used to be one of the biggest European markets for Prince but as has been said it only sold about 40k. I don't buy the idea that in some countries it was selling hundreds of thousands when it was even struggling to do that in Prince's homeland. I wouldn't call the album a flop as such but it certainly didn't do the sales it could have done and perhaps was expected for an album that got great reviews.

hello org, i'd like attention, so im going to create a thread that bashes prince

purplerein said:

I don't see that discussing the facts and figures of 3121's sales and people's perceptions of whether 3121 was a flop or not is bashing Prince. This is a discussion site, not a 'fawn over everything Prince does and ignore reality' site. If 3121 sold zero copies, then there would be no discussion - it would be a flop, that's not bashing Prince, that would be a fact. Somewhere between zero and several million it turns from a flop into a hit, but each person has a different idea where that point is.

Your Xpectations and Prince's Xpectations R quite different. I'll bet $$ that he does NOT see it as a flop in any sense of the word.

Graycap23 said:

Who knows what Prince thinks, we can only guess, but rather than what he might think, why not tell us what you think and why? Are there any previous albums you regard as flops or are they all hits in your eyes?

Graycap23 said:

creatively i'm sure he's quite proud of it.

as far as the business venture that was supposed to catapult 3121 into his next big hit, i'd venture a guess that he's less than thrilled with the outcome.

Rockability said:

strongly disagree. great music on this album