The official first-week sales are in for Eminem's recently released eighth studio album "The Marshall Mathers LP 2," and the result is impressive. The album had the second biggest debut of the year, and has already been certified gold with 792,000 units sold, making it one of the highest debuts of the year.

Although the sales record of "MMLP2" is nowhere near the original "The Marshall Mathers LP," which sold 1.76 million copies in 2000, the album definitely exceeds the records of 2009 "Relapse" selling 608,000 units and 2010 "Recovery," moving 741,000 units. The album was also streamed 10 million times in its debut week, and beat its early predictions of selling approximately 750,000 units. Consequently, "The Marshall Mathers LP 2" sold more than the combined figures for the #2 through #32 albums, and accounted for 14 percent of all album sales last week.

"Unlike most people in the record industry, he's consistently able to sell hundreds of thousands of records in one week," said Keith Caulfield, Billboard's associate director of charts/retail. "We're taking about an artist repeatedly doing this since his second album. It's normal for him. And he can sell tracks. And he can sell out stadiums. How can you bottle what he does? It's amazing."

"MMLP2" has already passed Drake's "Nothing Was The Same," which sold 658,000 copies in October; it is running in second place, just behind Justin Timberlake's "The 20/20 Experience," which debuted with 968,000 units in March.

"Both are considered album artists," said Caulfield. "Eminem is admired as a storyteller, and you need the whole album to get the full experience.

"And both come from the late 1990s/early 2000s era, when the album format was king, before YouTube and digital downloads. If you wanted music, you had to buy the album. A lot of their fans fondly remember buying 'N Sync albums or 'The Slim Shady' LP, and they still want to buy albums in 2013. It's harder for young artists who don't have that history with fans."

In hip-hop world, it seems that the only competitions that Slim Shady has to challenge now are Jay Z's 2x platinum-certified "Magna Carta Holy Grail" and Drake's 1x platinum-certified "Nothing Was The Same," in order to make "MMLP2" the highest selling hip-hop album of the year.