Robin Thicke's Poor Paula Album Sales Explained: "It Was a Perfect Storm of Issues," Says Expert

Find out just how little the singer's record sold

By Brett Malec, Baker Machado Jul 14, 2014 8:21 PMTags
Robin ThickeEthan Miller/Getty Images

It's safe to say that Robin Thicke's latest album Paula was not so successful.

According to Billboard, the 37-year-old singer's album sold only 24,000 copies (only 530 sold in the U.K. and a mere 54 in Australia). Compare that to Thicke's mega-hit "Blurred Lines," which skyrocketed to the top of the charts in its first week with 177,000 copies.

So why are the numbers so bad?

"It was a perfect storm of issues and none of this is any sort of revelation," Billboard's Keith Caulfield tells E! News. "You are coming off of this huge hit in ‘Blurred Lines' that was controversial—it really ruffled a lot of feathers, including feminists and women. The video, which was incredibly controversial, combined with the Miley Cyrus performance on the VMAs didn't win him a lot of fans in many ways."

Jason Merritt/Getty Images

Caulfield added, "Then you have all of that brouhaha combined with his roller coaster of a personal life in the past six months or so where he separated from his wife combined with the woman on Twitter with his hand where it probably wasn't supposed to be. And then you name your album Paula after your estranged wife and then you name the song to get her back...so it is basically a perfect storm of all of these things that didn't resonate with consumers and that's all it is."

Caulfield says Paula's foreign sales might be as low as they are because Thicke isn't known as well internationally.

"I am not sure what his appeal was internationally before ‘Blurred Lines,'" Caulfield said. "He really was a core R&B artist for a long time before ‘Blurred Lines' turned him into a pop star. And the song gave him an international hit single. I don't know if he was a known entity in Australia before ‘Blurred Lines.' To them in Australia, and I don't know this, they might look at him as a one-hit-wonder, like a fluke hit...He just has a lot of stuff going on and it is going to be really interesting to see what happens next."

Although he hasn't seen the second week numbers, Caulfield projects that Thicke's album sales could drop 70 percent or more, something he says is very normal for an album from a well-known artist.