Nelly Concert Footage; First-Week Sales

Here's some footage of Nelly's Myspace concert, which he performed earlier this month at the Neighborhood Theatre. I blogged about the show a couple of days later, saying that I would buy his new album, Brass Knuckles, because I was impressed with the new material he performed. The CD came out last week and I still need to go get it. According to the Soundscan numbers released today, Brass Knuckles sold just 83,700 copies in its first week.

Nelly's four-year absence from releasing new albums has taken an obvious toll. In 2004 he released two albums, Sweat and Suit, on the same day, selling 341,000 and 395,000 copies, respectively, during the first week. Sure, the music biz has changed in the last few years and no artist is putting up the kind of numbers they used to, but Nelly may have lost much of his fanbase. As he told one 18-year-old girl at his concert here, "I can understand if you don't know the words. You were 10 when this song came out."