Despite little to no promo outside of the internet, it will be officially revealed tomorrow by Soundscan that Nas’ Untitled album sold approximately 113,000 units. I’m not going to place “in its first week” at the end of that sentence, because how this industry has chosen to center their support (or lack of) around the strength in first week sales is just ridiculous.Yes, Def Jam, even though you didn’t work hard to get Nas the airplay or video play he deserved –just like you failed to do last time– Nasir still managed to pull it off. And would you look at that: unlike these ringtone rappers who bag paid-for airplay and a #1 hit on the charts, Nas can move over 100,000 copies in the first week. Now that’s what you call a following.

Now that Hov has washed his hands of his Deaf Jam duties, I wonder who LL is going to blame now. Why? Forget hip-hop; IDJ is the new R&B label. Rihanna got a re-release of her album after dropping a million and one singles, Ne-Yo is on album three, they’re still vigorously pushing The Dream even though his album was a flop, they’re working on a new artist named Karina Passian, etc etc. In short, what a joke this label has turned out to be. We knew L.A Reid was a bad idea from the jump.

Hiphopspy never cares how many units a artist is moving these days. But NAS is a top 5 all time rapper that we will follow till the end.