West wins the duel of discs with 50

KANYE WEST’S “Graduation” and 50 Cent’s “Curtis” arrived last week with a hype that matched Oscar De La Hoya’s May prizefight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. That battle went 12 rounds. In the hip-hop showdown, however, West won in a rout.

West’s “Graduation” sold 957,000 copies, easily surpassing the 691,000 copies sold by “Curtis,” according to Nielsen SoundScan. West’s total is the highest first-week sales for an album in more than two years, when 50 Cent’s sophomore effort, “The Massacre,” opened with 1.1 million copies in March 2005, the last album to reach the seven-figure mark.

Not since 1991 have two albums registered first-week sales of more than 600,000 copies in the same week. “Graduation” accounted for one out of every 10 albums sold in the U.S. last week, as Billboard puts overall album sales at 9.16 million, up almost 24% from the previous week’s record low total of 7.4 million.

Combined, the two releases also breathed some much-needed life into hip-hop sales, which were down more than 30% for the first half of 2007 compared with a year earlier. The genre is declining at a rate faster than the beleaguered music industry as overall album sales trail those of 2006 by about 14%.

West bucked the general trend further by improving his first-week sales this time out. “Graduation” sold 11% more than his “Late Registration” tallied in 2005, with 860,000 copies. First-week sales for “Curtis” are down 40% from those of “The Massacre.”

50 Cent vowed to retire as a solo artist if West outsold him but also qualified his wager, saying he’d follow through only if West’s second-week sales dropped less than 70%. So the other shoe awaits.

Brett Wickard, who owns the 10-store Bull Moose chain based in Portland, Me., credits West’s feat to his ability to incorporate other genres into his sound, working with rock composers such as Jon Brion on “Late Registration” and sampling electronic faves Daft Punk on current single “Stronger.” “People want artists to push the boundaries,” Wickard says. “Kanye did more of that than 50 Cent.”

Not to be forgotten in the West vs. 50 Cent hullabaloo is country superstar Kenny Chesney, whose “Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates” was once seen as a dark-horse contender for the top spot. It entered at No. 3 after selling 387,000 copies.

The three albums sold a combined 2.03 million copies, a rarity in today’s music climate. Indeed, that number comes close to matching the 2.08 million CDs sold by the entirety of the Top-200 albums last week. Still, total album sales for the week trailed those of the same week last year by nearly 9%.

“We have yet to have a single week where album sales are up over the same week last year,” said Billboard magazine’s director of charts, Geoff Mayfield. “Yet the gap has narrowed, from 20% in January to about 14.3% this week.”

“Last week was all about the hype, and [West and 50 Cent] did better than they would have done if they had come out on their own,” says Andrew Gyger, a senior music product manager with the Virgin Entertainment Group. “It was kind of a blip. I’m not expecting sales to continue at that level.”

Perhaps not, but the industry’s fourth-quarter sales push is now in full gear. Next week’s battle for No. 1 will see West and 50 Cent vying to hang on at the top against albums released Tuesday by Reba McEntire, who has a group of star-studded duets -- rapper Chamillionaire, Barry Manilow (whose collection set a presales record on the QVC shopping channel) and James Blunt, on his sophomore outing.

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todd.martens@latimes.com