....Around the world, the numbers were much, much worse. In the UK, Paula debuted at number 200—the lowest spot on the ranking. It sold 530 copies in its first week available. Sales numbers are often much smaller in the country because of the population size, but they are not typically that low.


After the media picked up on that story and it spread like wildfire, chart numbers were released in Australia, and it was revealed that the album didn’t even make it to the top 500 albums in the country. In fact, it sold so few copies, ARIA (Australia’s Billboard equivalent) can’t even tell how many it actually did move. The lowest album recorded sold 54 copies, and everything outside of the top 500 isn’t measured, so Paula sold fewer than that. How many fewer, we cannot tell.

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After his headline-grabbing performance with Miley Cyrus at the MTV Music Video Awards—the event that launched the word twerk into the lexicon of every American—things started to go downhill for the singer. Claims that both the music video (which also attracted a lot of media attention and has so far received over 325 million views on YouTube) and the lyrics to “Blurred Lines” were actually incredibly misogynistic began to collect.


A few months later, Thicke and his wife, actress Paula Patton, announced that after nine years of marriage they had decided to split. While Patton has stuck to the decision, the singer has gone on a very public campaign to win her over again, even going so far as to name this latest CD after her and release a single called “Get Her Back”.

Today, Robin Thicke is almost unilaterally disliked. A Twitter Q&A he did a month ago backfired immensely, with participants bombarding him with jokes and inappropriate comments. His Paula campaign—from his latest music video to lyrics to the general feel of his current work—is considered creepy, and the numbers show how put off people are by the mixture of misogyny and—as some critics have put it—simply bad music.