Set In Stone sales are the reason 50 Cent has spent the last two weeks posting about Rick Ross, and the newest one went up today.
50 shared a screenshot of an article about Ross hitting a new chart low and captioned it “I’M SORRY ITS OVER, CANT FAKE IT FOREVER!” No name attached, no setup, no explanation. He has never needed one.
Here is what he is pointing at. Set In Stone debuted at number 39 on the Billboard 200 with 19,000 equivalent album units. Equivalent album units is how Billboard counts records now, combining actual album purchases with streams and individual track sales converted into album math. Of that 19,000, only 2,096 were people buying the album outright. Roughly 14,800 of it came from streaming.
That makes Set In Stone the lowest charting debut of Rick Ross’s career, and it is not close. Ten of his previous eleven albums opened inside the Billboard 200 top 10. Five of them went to number one: Port of Miami, Trilla, Deeper Than Rap, God Forgives I Don’t and Mastermind. Richer Than I Ever Been opened at number 22 in 2021 and that already read as a slide. Too Good To Be True with Meek Mill did better than 30,000 units.
Set In Stone dropped July 17 through Gamma and Maybach Music Group, his first album through Gamma after years at Epic and Def Jam. Nineteen tracks. The feature list runs T.I., Jeezy, Gucci Mane, French Montana, Don Toliver, Kodak Black, The-Dream, Leon Thomas and BigXthaPlug, among others. The reviews were mostly positive. None of that moved the number.
50 got started on July 21, before any final count existed, working off early projections and claiming the album had sold 2,000 copies. He posted that Ross had 20 features and it did not help, then told him to “pack it up. It’s over, officer. Get ya bum juice and ya wings.” He followed it with a photo of himself eating popcorn, asking what a man does when his tickets do not sell and his album does not sell either.
The part nobody caught: when the real Set In Stone sales came in, pure album sales landed at 2,096. 50 was quoting the sales column while everybody else was arguing about streaming units. He was closer to right than the people correcting him.
Ross has not been quiet through any of it. He called the whole thing propaganda and fake bot numbers, told people to go test the product and judge the music instead of the chatter, and said the bots commenting on his album have no posts of their own. Then he turned it around on Shreveport, accusing 50 of borrowing money from people there and failing to land the film studio loans he was chasing, and asking why anybody needs a film studio in the first place. He called Set In Stone album of the year and promised to shoot a video for every track on it.
Today Ross said the Set In Stone sales figures show he is playing the long game.
The feud itself is older than most of the people arguing about it online, running back to the mid 2000s and never fully going away. What is different this round is that 50 does not have to write a punchline. He is just posting the chart.
