14 DAY TRIAL // Robin Thicke is having a seriously bad year: he cheated on his estranged wife Paula Patton and got busted and dumped, he poured all his heartbreak into a full album dedicated to her, aptly called “Paula,” and hasn’t stopped talking about her since, but the album still failed to cause a dent in sales.
It barely made a scratch. Numbers for the first week of “Paula” have been disastrous, if not actually even worse, NME reports: in the UK, the album moved only 530 copies. You read that right: “Paula” sold five hundred and thirty copies in its first week.
That’s an even worse performance than Kevin Federline had with his debut album, “Playing with Fire,” which, thanks to his association to Britney Spears (he was her husband at the time), sold 6,000 copies back in the US.
NME points out that, by selling a little over 500 copies, “Paula” managed just 2 percent of the sales of “Blurred Lines,” which moved almost 26,000 items in the UK in its debut week.
Things aren’t looking any better across the pond either: “Over in the States sales are also down, with Billboard reporting that the record has sold 25,000 copies compared to 177,000 first week sales of ‘Blurred Lines’.”
Perhaps even worse, if Thicke really hoped that this album would help him get Paula back, it has failed to do that too. He admitted in recent interviews that she hasn’t spoken with him for months and that she didn’t even provide him with a feedback on all the songs he wrote and released about her.
The critics and the fans did plenty of that, though, perhaps even more than Thicke would have liked. Reviews trashed the album for being cheesy and bad, stalkerish and just plain cringeworthy, but also his attempts at milking the drama in his personal life, presumably without his wife’s consent, to boost interest in his music.
The fans turned on Robin too, when he least expected it. Just recently, he had a Twitter Q&A planned to discuss the album and promo appearances, but it soon turned into a nightmare when people from all over the world reminded him of his previous misogynistic songs and of the many times he treated Paula like a doormat, embarrassing her in public.
If at any point Robin honestly thought that airing all the dirty laundry in public on a music album would be the best way to get his wife back after he broke her heart, he was seriously misguided. If, on the contrary, this was just a stunt, it definitely backfired.
At this point, it’s clear that, even if Robin Thicke poses some interest as a celebrity for the juicy gossip bits he delivers, not even the people who still dance to his “Blurred Lines” want to give his cheesy “Paula” a listen.
How about you? Did you buy or plan to buy the album? Will you listen to it online, or are you just about done with Thicke? Let us know in the comments section below.