So the 2 official soundtracks for The Wire have been out for a couple weeks now, and there's some good news and some bad news. The good is that the CDs have largely been getting positive, including my friend Tom Breihan's Pitchfork review, which favored Beyond Hamsterdam, and he featured Diablo's "Jail Flick" on a recent podcast. The bad news, or at least not great news, is that, as the Baltimore Sun's Sam Sessa recently reported on the Midnight Sun blog, according to SoundScan, only 2,000 copies of The Wire: And All the Pieces Matter and 400 copies of Beyond Hamsterdam have been sold in their first 2 weeks on shelves. Granted, CD sales in general are down, compilations are generally the hardest kind of hip hop album to sell, and The Wire is not really a hit show, even by premium cable standards. But I think I expected at least a little better than this (and a CD has to sell at least 3 thousand in a slow week to crack the Billboard 200). Hopefully, though, the good word of mouth will spread and as the 5th season of the show progresses, more people will pick up these great discs and check out the music.

Labels: magazines/newspapers, The Wire