This weeks Soundscan Numbers shine a little light on the Current State of the Music Industry. Jim Jones’ fourth solo album, Pray IV Reign sold 42,982 copies in its first week. Slim Thug’s second solo album, Boss of All Bosses, sold 32, 721 copies in its first week.
Jim Jones is signed to major record label, Columbia Records while Slim Thug is signed to independent label, Koch Records. The marketing dollars for Jim Jones album, certainly exceeded the budget of Slim Thug’s project. However, Jim Jones only sold just about 10,000 more copies than Slim thug did. This raises some very serious questions:

1. Are major labels almost on their way out?
2. Is it financially smarter to sign with an Independent Label?
3. Does it make sense in this day and age spending millions of marketing dollars on a project?