Is Lil' Wayne the record industry's last hope? After 2005's 50 Cent album release, The Massacre, you would've been hard pressed to find a record exec who would've predicted another album to move more than a million units in its first week. After all, since 50 Cent's record three years ago, even grandmothers got broadband Internet in their homes and figured out how to use iTunes; things were supposed to get worse for the industry. And, while anyone from Sony to Bad Boy will tell you they have, Lil' Wayne's Tha Carter III, shipping just over 1 million copies in the first week since its June 10 debut, represents an anomaly.

So how come it was Lil' Wayne, and not even the likes of world superstar and egomaniac Kanye West, who accomplished the impossible?

Because the man is a master of hype.

Not only does his jail time and near-death car crash add legitimacy factor (see: 50 Cent's gun fighting), but Wayne also understands the marketplace.

Fans wanted, needed, yearned for his music, and they took it from him, with leaked tracks popping up all over the Internet and radio airwaves in mid-2007. But rather than drop his record then, to close the floodgates of illegal downloads with a premature release as so many artists and execs choose to do, he wallowed in the free buzz. And then acted on it.

On Dec. 25, pushed back from Dec. 18, Wayne spat out an Internet-only release of The Leak, a five-song EP of the leaked tracks that was less an attempt to sell records and more an attempt to test the marketplace. Then, says Wikipedia:

On May 24th, 10 second snippets of multiple songs were leaked onto AT&T Media Mall.

On May 30th-31st, Tha Carter III was leaked internationally. The first of the leaks were distributed on May 30th at around 8pm where five songs from the track list were available on the internet. Hours later on May 31st at 12am-1am the whole album was leaked and posted on various websites for free download. The DJ responsible for the leaks was DJ Chuck T who retaliated for an interview conducted by Wayne, where he discredited all DJ's and the mixtape scene days before.

All of which built up a level of buzz that marketers would kill for.

Fans weren't satiated by The Leak; their appetites were only whetted for more. An original release date of Feb. 12 was set for Tha Carter III, his sixth solo album, but there were more leaks, and more pushbacks for the official debut. So when Tha Carter III, the last of Tha Carters, finally arrived this month, fans ate it up in droves.

Even this, however, is an oversimplification of how we got here: To a Louisiana rapper selling a million copies of his record in a music industry climate that's all but friendly to album sales. So bring in the blogs, the music analysts, and anyone else willing to weigh in on how this hip-hop star did something so huge. The fans, meanwhile, will be enjoying themselves with a decent new record. At last. (And you can too, at Imeem.)