NY Bloger

Just hours after he was officially crowned the victor in his much-hyped sales battle with 50 Cent, Kanye West turned up at GQ’s 50th anniversary party as the featured performer.

But the evening was more like a coronation for West, whose “Graduation” widely outsold 50 Cent’s “Curtis” in first week sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan: 957,000 copies to 691,000 copies.

“To be a champion, you’ve got to take out a cham

pion,” West declared Tuesday night, as an all-star crowd including Jay-Z, Beyonce and Diddy cheered him on. Moments later, he called for his “theme music,” then launched into a performance of his song “Good Life.”

Things couldn’t be much better for West, who gave the struggling music industry its best debut of the year with “Graduation,” besting the year’s previous first-week champ, Linkin Park, which sold 623,000 of “Minutes to Midnight” when it debuted in May.

“It feels overwhelming,” West told The Associated Press earlier in the day. “Everyone is coming up to me and telling me how proud they are of me.”

Though selling almost 700,000 copies in the first week is a sterling achievement, it was still a considerable letdown for 50 Cent. His last album, 2005’s “The Massacre,” sold 1.1 million in its first week. In fact, West’s “Graduation” is the only other album to come close to that figure since.

Last month, 50 didn’t think of West as much of a competitor: “It’s great marketing on Def Jam’s part, by putting us out there at the same time and make like we can actually be compared on some level,” he told the AP. In another interview, he said he would retire if West outsold him.

Fifty, who is planning a world tour for his album, was conciliatory in defeat , which didn’t address whether he planned to make good on his vow to retire, he said: “I am very excited to have participated in one of the biggest album release weeks in the last two years. Collectively, we have sold hundreds of thousands of units in our debut week. This marks a great moment for hip-hop music, one that will go down in history.”

Indeed, Billboard.com reported that the top four-selling albums, including Kenny Chesney’s “Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates,” and “High School Musical 2,” sold 2.2 million copies, more than the top 200 albums had sold in the previous week combined.