.

.
If you have access to the Internet or TV, chances are you’ve been inundated with advertisements for Lady Gaga’s new album Born This Way. Just to recap, in addition to singing and acting on Saturday Night Live last week, Gaga recently appeared on the season finale of American Idol and rapped with Oprah Winfrey, David Letterman and Ellen DeGeneres on their respective shows. Oh, and don’t forget that she also has her own FarmVille community called GagaVille.
.
However, despite all of those appearances, and the fact that Amazon.com’s one-day 99 cent download offer for Born This Way crashed the site’s servers earlier this week, Billboard is speculating that Gaga will  sell 800,000 copies of the album during the first week, which is still less than Lil Wayne’s last album Tha Carter III which sold 1,005,545 copies in its first week.
.
“Wayne’s audience is built in, so he doesn’t really have to advertise at all to get them to come out, but Gaga’s platform is different,” Entertainment Weekly’s music editor Leah Greenblatt told MTV. “Artists like Rihanna and Katy Perry can sell a ton of records without doing what [Gaga's] doing, but for Gaga’s core fanbase, it’s about quality, not quantity. She has a core group she’s speaking to, and she speaks so much and so constantly to these fans, but not necessarily to casual fans. She’s got that army who will support her, and all those other casual fans will still buy all the other stuff [out there].”
.

That said, it’s important to keep in mind that Tha Carter III came out almost three years ago and nearly all artists are selling significantly less albums than they did back then. The real test will be seeing how many records Lil Wayne is able to move when he drops Tha Carter IV on June 21st. Then again, Weezy is nothing, if not full of surprises, right?
.