Popularity has its limits, and hype often gives the illusion those limits do not exist. Los Angeles Lakers star rookie Lonzo Ball has 732,000 followers on Twitter, more than 4.4 million on Instagram, and probably wakes up with remnants of his father LaVar Balls proclamations of him being better than Steph Curry floating through his subconscious. So, when the 20-year-old star decided to release his debut rap project, Born 2 Ball, on February 15th, with a childhood pic of him and his loquacious dad as the cover, it shouldve been a slam dunk for his millions of fans.
Instead, it flopped harder than Chris Paul and Manu Ginobili fake colliding into each other. Balls rookie NBA season is almost over, but his rap career may have been dead before the eldest Ball noticed it.
According to data provided by Nielsen, the eldest Ball sons Born 2 Ball project only sold 19,000 copies in its first month, as of March 15. To put that in perspective, his tweet announcing the release of the project received 29,000 likes alone in a few days. Not many twitter fingers got their hands on the music.
As a whole, 15,000 of the projects sales were streaming equivalent album (SEA) that counts every 1,500 streams of music from an album as one album sale. Born 2 Ball received more than 22 million audio streams,19 million of the streams coming in the first two weeks of release. Just like the Lakers team hes leading to a #11 seed in the Western Conference, the project is top-heavy, as more than 11 million of the streams the album has received have come from two songs, Super Saiyan and ZO2, with the latter being the most popular of the album, receiving 5.908 million on-demand audio streams.
Lonzo Ball – Born 2 Ball (Full Album) | (Official Audio)
Lonzo Ball releases his debut rap album on 2/15/2018. Lonzo (under the artist name Zo) refers to his infamous father, the Los Angeles Lakers, and more on his 17 tracks. Tracklist and time marks: 0:00 – LaVar 3:15 – ZO2 5:42 – BBB 9:11 – Get Off 12:06 – Super Saiyan 15:24 – Grind Mode (ft.
Not surprisingly, things could have been a lot worse for Lonzo if he didnt have his dad bringing attention. Lonzos tribute song to his father, entitled Lavar, is one of the five songs on the 17-track album to be streamed more than one million times. Thus proving once again that more people hearing LaVar means more people will care to hear Lonzo.
Big Baller Brand tried to swindle people into buying $495 pairs of glorified Skechers knock-offs before Lonzo played a single NBA game, and there are probably more pairs with dust in them than feet. Hard to say if the buying public soured on the young star, but they sure did treat 17 songs from Lonzo Ball at a reasonable price of $9.99 on iTunes the same as they did his overpriced sneakers. Born 2 Ball sold 2,000 copies through album downloads and only an extra 2,300 Track Equivalent Album (TEA) sales which counts every 10 track downloads from an album as an album sale. There were no album download purchases for Born 2 Ball for the weeks of March 8 and March 15, and only 100 TEA sales during that time.
For those surprised by Born 2 Balls putrid sales, you need to make sure you do your Googles. According to Google Trends, search activity for Born 2 Ball peaked the day after it was released, on February 16, before it dropped 60% the next day. By February 24th, all inquiry about Lonzos debut opus was as non-existent as Markelle Fultzs jump shot.
Only 1,000 copies of Born 2 Ball was sold last week. At this pace, Lonzos music career could be over before his first season is. But, hey, at least he can be Joel Embiids warmup musicduring the playoffs.
