It's no mean feat to make that move from behind-the-scenes hitmaker to up-front star.
In the past few months, Kanye West and Mario Winans, two major producer/writers, crashed into the Top 10 with their first releases as performers.

Yet some people with equally long track records of creating hits for others have had a terrible time trying to rack up any of their own.

The latest example is N.E.R.D., made up of Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams - the producers known as the Neptunes - and the rapper Shay. "Fly or Die," their new album, plummeted to No. 97 on Billboard's Top 200 Album list after just seven weeks. So far, it has sold only 282,000 copies.

At the same time, artists from Justin Timberlake to Jay-Z to Britney Spears, whose albums contain songs written or produced by the Neptunes, are selling in the millions.

The N.E.R.D.s had reason to expect their album to fly, considering how high Williams sent his profile in the last year by handling lead vocals on Jay-Z's smash "Frontin'."

That cut got to No. 5 on Billboard's Hot 100 Song list and held the No. 1 slot on the R&B singles chart for six weeks.

But the N.E.R.D. single "She Wants to Move" never made the Hot 100 and inched no higher than 73 on R&B lists.

Part of the problem has to do with the kind of radio segmentation N.E.R.D. was formed to smash.

The single, like much of N.E.R.D.'s work, falls between formats, taking as many rock influences as R&B. In fact, N.E.R.D. presents what amounts to a new genre: punk-soul.

Creatively, it's a bold move, but commercially, it's been a bomb.

That N.E.R.D. could falter, even though Hugo and Williams are the best-known modern production team, underscores the suspicion that dogs anyone known mainly for background skills.

That prejudice has helped sink albums by producers as powerful as Swizz Beats, Timbaland and Jermaine Dupri.

Swizz, one of the main sonic whizzes behind the Ruff Ryders crew, sold only 238,000 copies of his solo debut, "Presents G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories." Dupri failed to go gold with his latest work, "Instructions." And Timbaland pushed only a paltry 135,000 copies of his most recent album with Magoo, "Under Construction Part II."

At least the Neptunes still have their day jobs.

Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/194362p-167957c.html