50 Cent sales start slowly

THE name “50 Cent” and the words “modest success” just don’t seem to go together for lots of reasons, but that’s the best way to describe the early sales of the “Get Rich or Die Tryin’ ” soundtrack CD, which hit stores on Tuesday and is lagging well off the rapper’s usually torrid sales pace.

“It wasn’t quite what some people expected,” said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst for Billboard, the music industry trade publication.

Early reports from retailers had the 18-track CD on pace to sell about 300,000 in its first week, although the release of the tie-in film on Wednesday should factor into its weekend performance.

Selling 300,000 copies of an album is nothing to scoff at -- this week, the No. 1 album in the country, the hits collection “Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 20,” sold 378,000, while at No. 2, Santana’s new “All That I Am,” was a distant second after selling 142,000 copies in its first week in stores.

Still, the numbers don’t match the retail heroics of the brawny 50 Cent. In March, his last release, “The Massacre,” sold 1.14 million copies in its first four days in stores, and his 2003 debut album sold 872,000 copies in four days. (Both got shortened debut weeks because Interscope Records rushed them earlier than scheduled to undercut on-line piracy.)

With the publicity (and, of course, controversy) surrounding the film debut of 50 Cent in the quasi-autobiographical “Get Rich,” many observers expected to see the rapper again reclaim the top spot on the pop charts.

Now it seems more likely that Kenny Chesney’s “The Road and the Radio” will take that honor when Nielsen SoundScan releases the next pop chart Wednesday. Chesney’s CD appears on track to sell 600,000 copies in its first week.

Mayfield said the early performance of the “Get Rich” soundtrack might have been slowed by the lack of a strong hit single. The massive radio airplay for Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” for example, propelled the soundtrack to his film “8 Mile” to 702,000 sales in its first week in 2002.

He also said the lingering popularity of the rapper’s “Massacre” might be pulling some sales away from the new CD.