Is Walmart Sabotaging Black Artists From Album Retail?

By Isis Wisdom

I had to ask this question because there seems to be an ongoing trend here. First last month it was Wale. The Washington D.C. native whose album could not be found in any of the stores. More below.

I’m talking about I went to best buy and Wal-mart and could not find not one album. Allhiphop’s illseed took notice and asked the question is this sabotage? While I can’t imagine why they would not carry Wale’s album in stores maybe Interscope was slacking on their job or maybe they were hoping for more digital sales?

Next is Chris Brown who went off on twitter a day before he deleted his twitter account going off about his music not appearing in the Wal-mart stores and he even went as far as going to the back with the manager to confirm his suspicions only to find his worse nightmare had come true. Not only has wal-mart not had any of Chris Browns music in their stores according to management sources in some chains have stated he is not even on their list of new releases. I personally went myself and the only places that I saw Chris Brown’s album was the malls, mom and pop record stores and few other smaller chains but not wal-mart. Maybe the day I went they just didn’t have them in that day. In the meantime Billboard magazine contacted wal-mart to find out what the scoop was and they vehemently denied it. Here is what they had to say:

“We are surprised at the comments on Twitter, since all Walmart stores carried the CD since its release, including the Wallingford store mentioned in the post,” so read the statement from the U.S. giant retailer.

“This store had in fact sold through their copies over the weekend. The majority of our stores are showing today they have copies on hand,” it was further stated to Billboard. Wallmart is not the only store denying the boycott report as another retailer Newbury Comics has also said the same thing.

“We have it; it’s not selling much,” head of purchasing Carl Mello said. “We never considered not bringing it in. If we stopped bringing in records from every unsavory character that puts out an album, there would be tumbleweed floating around our stores.”

Side note: Chris Brown is realizing at a very early age how dirty the game really is and that is unfortunate for him. In this country a black man makes one mistake and it costs him his career and his life. With a criminal record and his fame, it would be very hard for him to try and do anything else in his life. Tiger woods should take heed. Maybe perhaps if all of the retails store chains would have carried the album like they were supposed to, his album sales would have went up. But wait, maybe they could not have him selling more records then Rihanna? Something smells of sabotage and the music business is a dirty game.