Sexyy Red dropped her third mixtape, In Sexyy We Trust, on May 24. The 14-track project reportedly debuted with around 27,000 first-week units.
Music industry veteran Jermaine Dupri, 51, spoke about Sexyy Red’s five-figure opening during the SelectCon conference in Atlanta. The So So Def label founder used the numbers as an example of why rap music has not been as commercially successful in recent years.
“The industry still tries to make you believe that if you’re a hot artist and you got a single, that selling albums don’t matter,” Jermaine Dupri told Steve Stoute. “Sexyy Red’s album only doing 28,000 copies. In the era that I came in the music industry, if you sold 28,000 copies, you didn’t get no other chance to even walk in the building again.”
Jermaine Dupri went on to suggest top music acts during the height of his career moved 80,000-900,000 units. For example, Dupri’s 1998 album Life in 1472 sold more than 162,000 copies in its opening week, granted it was the pre-streaming era.
In Sexyy We Trust landed at No. 17 on the latest Billboard 200 album chart. Sexyy Red’s most recent body of work became the highest-charting project of her career.
2023’s Hood Hottest Princess amassed a reported 8,000 first-week units for a No. 193 start, but it eventually peaked at the Billboard 200’s No. 62 position.
Sexyy Red scored a Top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with “Get It Sexyy” off In Sexyy We Trust. The 26-year-old rhymer also made it into the Hot 100’s Top 20 as a feature on Drake’s “Rich Baby Daddy” with SZA.
