Why was Curtis pushed back?

In Hollywood, when hardly anyone is interested in an upcoming film, they say it isn't "tracking" well. I'm assuming that's what's going on with the new 50 Cent album. In case you haven't heard, Curtis was recently pushed way the fuck back to September from its original release date next month.

Of course the official reason Fiddy gave this site is that there was some snafu on the manufacturing end that's going to take another month or so to fix.

To wit:

"Yes it’s true my album has been pushed back because it wasn’t delivered to the plant in order to be distributed and delivered world wide so it has to be pushed back," 50 told XXLMag.com.

Which sounds like a buncha BS to me, no offense to my benefactor or anything.

The reason we know it only takes a few days to print up a buncha copies of an album is because that's when a lot of these albums end up getting bootlegged. On the rare occasion that an album makes it through its entire promotional cycle without being leaked, like with the last T.I. album, it still ends up hitting the streets a few days before it hits the stores, because that's when it's being manufactured.

Once you send an album off to be manufactured, there's basically no way to keep it from being leaked. You'll recall that this is why I had to call bullshit last year when Lupe Fiasco announced that he was going to prevent his album from being bootlegged by waiting until the last minute to record it. (Haven't parts of that shit been bootlegged already?)

Speaking of which, I can only imagine the fallout if Curtis somehow ended up on the Internets some time next month, a couple of months still before its new street date. Granted album sales are already down so much these days, but if Linkin Park can sell 700,000 of its new... um, release, then I'm sure that Jimmy et al. over at Interscope are counting on the Fiddy album to be able to pull something similar.

Part of the reason it's being pushed back is because they want to release it on the same day worldwide. A lot of bands these days will release their album on one day in Europe and then wait six months later to release it here in the US, but obviously that's not an option with Curtis. If they tried anything like that with Fiddy's album, people would just bootleg the shit out of it everywhere it's not already out.

At any rate, the longer the new Fiddy album sits around waiting to be released, the more likely it is to end up in the hands of Arabs, and you know what that means. Curtis could single handedly end up funding the next 9/11. No but really, if I'm 50 Cent, and obviously I'm not (have you seen my abs lately?), I'm not sure if I'd even want to take the chance of having my shit so widely bootlegged.

So obviously the problem with the new 50 Cent album has to do with marketing more so than manufacturing. My guess is that the TIs at Interscope are aware that basically no one at all likes any of the umpteen singles so far, and so far this beef with Cam'ron, from which the album received its title, even, has been more sad than it's been genuinely amusing, so they're gonna try to do something between now and September to generate some more interest.

It'll be interesting to see what that is.

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I wonder if this means Fiddy will stil be on the cover of the next issue of XXL, after this dumbass T.I. vs. T.I.P. cover. You'll recall that the next issue is supposed to be some special 10th anniversary, but let's keep it real. Why wouldn't 50 Cent be on the 10th anniversary issue anyway? He's already been on half of the other issues?