Industry News

Tyga trumpeted Tuesday's release date for his long-awaited Young Money/Universal debut, "Careless World," for weeks. The album's title has come to mean more than the MC probably intended: While the LP did officially drop on that date, an uncleared sample meant that it didn't exactly drop everywhere.

Sources told Billboard.biz that the label had shipped approximately 150,000 copies of the album before last Thursday, when it sent a recall notice to retailers because the sample -- a portion of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech used in the album's title track -- had not been cleared.

"They basically recalled [the albums]," Tyga told DJ Greg Street in a V-103 interview posted on DDotOmen. "I'm looking at my Twitter and fans were hitting me up all day, posting pictures. They have them, and they have some in stores but then they got a piece of paper next to them [saying] 'Recall: Can't sell.' My fans were going crazy, like 'I got it in my hands, I'm thinking about just stealing it but I want to buy it, though.' "

Most retailers abided by the recall but, apparently due to the holiday weekend, not every outlet got the message. Larger outlets like Target and Best Buy did not sell the album but some independent retailers and individual outlets within some chains put out the album for sale on its Tuesday release date, a source said. Several hundred units were sold by those outlets, the source said.

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A new album master was created in time for the street date and all digital merchants have received the new version, a source told Billboard.biz. Physical copies of the new version of the album began re-shipping today (February 23) and are expected to reach most retail outlets tomorrow through Monday.

The label did not change the album's release date, despite the recall, because of concerns over piracy, a source told Billboard.biz.