Eminem before fame: The story of the first album that only sold ‘around 70 copies’

A young man waits for the bus. It’s cold and he has only a few coins on him. He asks his friend if he has 15 cents. His friend doesn’t have much either. Together they try to scrape together enough to buy something and catch the bus. The boy is fed up with relying on public transit, he doesn’t own a car and still lives with his mother. “I’m 21,” he says, and there’s a baby on the way. He wants to get rich. He wants to make records that sell. He’s tired of being poor.

This is the scene described at the start of Never 2 Far, one of the tracks on Infinite, Eminem’s debut album, released in 1996 and a commercial failure. The situation maps directly onto the life of Marshall Mathers, Eminem’s real name, who had become a father a few months earlier, was still living with his mother and was looking for a way out financially through rap.

When Infinite was released on November 12, 1996, Eminem had just turned 24 (by industry standards and in terms of stardom it was already late in the game). He still had no idea he would become one of the best-selling artists in history. At that time he was simply Marshall Mathers, an inexperienced but determined Detroit rapper who had spent years battling and trying to get someone to listen to his songs.

Many people don’t even know that album exists. Yet it is impossible to understand the Eminem we know today without it: it addresses an unstable childhood, a city in crisis, precarious finances and the dream of escaping through a vibrant hip hop scene in which he still had much to prove. There is also an almost naïve belief that hard work leads to reward. Infinite, however, failed.

We’re going to record an album

When Eminem reached adulthood, Eight Mile was still a road in Detroit that formed part of his daily life and served as a border between Black Detroit and the white suburbs. Years later it became the title of a film that marked entire generations of young people raised in the 2000s and an inseparable symbol of his biography, but back then it was where brothers Jeff and Mark Bass had their studio, Bassment Sound. It was there that Eminem found a place to record his first songs.

Mark Bass encountered Eminem through a Detroit radio station. After hearing him, he managed to get in touch with him. By then Eminem had spent years trying to break in. “He wasn’t ready yet. He was trying to figure out who he wanted to be, so he copied the shit other people did. He was too young to have his own style,” he recalls in the documentary Partners In Rhyme: The True Story of Infinite. But the Bass Brothers decided to gamble on him, and Infinite gained some traction on local radio. The lyrics dealt with typical rap themes: money, family, betrayal and the need to prove oneself. Eminem still believed that if he worked hard enough someone would eventually pay attention.

The Bass Brothers made a rookie mistake: trying to tame an artist to make him fit what the industry considered marketable. During the recording of Infinite they tried to adapt Eminem to what they thought would work on the radio, before he had found his style. “We had been making songs to please the stations, trying to make them less explicit,” Jeff Bass later recalled in the documentary. Until Eminem decided he’d had enough: “He wanted to do things his way.”

The Bass Brothers prepared hundreds of cassettes and a few vinyl copies of Infinite and distributed them around Detroit. About 250 tapes reached the Hip Hop Shop and some members of Parliament-Funkadelic took copies to hand out on their tours. The problem was that all that local support couldn’t find a way to leave Detroit. “Everyone supported Eminem, but we didn’t know how to get the record to people,” Mark Bass explained. They tried to place the record in stores, but many wouldn’t accept copies on consignment. “We couldn’t sell anything.”

Enter Slim Shady

After Infinite, Eminem kept trying to make a living in music while taking precarious jobs, working as a cook and dishwasher at a Detroit-area restaurant, and trying to support his daughter Hailie. The record hadn’t worked and his rapping was still criticized for mimicking other artists. In 1997 he lost his job and went through a period of financial hardship, but he kept writing and recording. That year he prepared The Slim Shady EP, a project that kept rap at its core but introduced a far more aggressive, irreverent and grotesque voice.

In October 1997 he traveled to Los Angeles to take part in the Rap Olympics, a rap-battle competition in which he reached the final and lost to Otherwize. He didn’t walk away with a record deal, but something better happened: his performance caught the attention of Dean Geistlinger, an Interscope employee who asked for a copy of The Slim Shady EP. Geistlinger passed the record to Jimmy Iovine, head of the label, who ultimately played it for rapper-producer Dr. Dre. The meeting didn’t result in an immediate contract, but it did get someone in the industry to hear the work Eminem had produced on his own. The EP was released in December 1997 and began circulating among underground rap fans.

That year Slim Shady, the alter ego with which Eminem presented himself to the world, started to take shape. When he returned to the studio, Marshall had that name tattooed and, according to Mark Bass, seemed “like a completely different person.” What had happened? Mark Bass offered another explanation: “Something happened to him and he became Slim Shady.” Eminem put it differently: “It seemed that, once I stopped giving a shit about what I said, people started to pay attention to what I said.”

Viewed from Slim Shady’s perspective, Infinite can also be read as a premature debut, the work of someone who hadn’t yet found himself. The paradox is that Slim Shady, a manufactured character, ended up bringing him closer to a more authentic version of himself: an inner cartoonish figure eager to cause trouble, scandalize adults and turn his frustrations into jokes—often at others’ expense. His provocations had the childish logic of someone who discovers they can say anything outrageous without consequences, although in this case the game mixed with violent fantasies and a cruelty that went beyond mere mischief. The character allowed him to exaggerate what he had previously repressed, but the distance between Marshall and Slim Shady also served as a shield: having the alter ego speak does not remove the consequences of what is said nor the responsibility for it.

The failure of Infinite would later be summed up in a figure that has become part of Eminem’s legend. In his memoir, The Way I Am, published in 2008, he wrote: “I recorded Infinite in 1995, my first album. It sold maybe 70 copies and didn’t get good reviews.” The number does not come from a sales audit but from the artist’s recollection more than a decade later. Other sources place the initial pressing at around 1,000 units. It is not known exactly how many copies reached buyers, how many were given away and how many remained in storage. What is clear is that the album had a very limited distribution and barely left Detroit. The 70 figure is, in any case, an effective way to encapsulate the little impact made by the debut of someone who would become one of the best-selling rappers in history.

Original copies of Infinite have since become collectors’ items. The album was released on cassette and vinyl, and its rarity has driven interest in physical editions. Its entry can be found on Discogs, where the history of its releases is also documented.

There is another peculiarity that makes Infinite an almost ghostly record. The full album remains unavailable officially on streaming platforms, although the title track has been released digitally. In 2009 it was temporarily offered for free download via ThisIs50, a site linked to 50 Cent, but it never became an official reissue on streaming services. Jake Bass, Jeff Bass’s son, explained in 2026 that the album hasn’t reached platforms because it contains numerous samples. To re-release it would require clearing the rights to those recordings, a process that can be complex and costly.

In 2016, to mark the album’s 20th anniversary, the Bass Brothers prepared a new version of Infinite. They recovered the original recording to rebuild the instrumental base and preserve Eminem’s vocals recorded two decades earlier. The remix was released digitally on November 17, 2016. There were also plans to reissue the album with additional material, but the project was complicated by a legal dispute over a vinyl pressing the Bass Brothers considered unauthorized. The exact status of the rights to the original masters is not entirely clear. Thirty years on, Infinite remains a rarity even for those who want to hear it.

Eminem, however, never thought the leap between Infinite and The Slim Shady EP was as abrupt as it looked from the outside. In a 1998 interview with Motormouth Magazine, he said the change had been brewing inside him for some time. He compared it to a shy child bullied at school who starts to accumulate anger and needs to fight back. When asked whether there was already some Slim Shady in Infinite, he pointed to one song: Open Mic. On it, Eminem had not yet named his alter ego, but he was already fantasizing about unleashed lyrical violence—the sort of serial-killer-with-a-hockey-mask imagery. Later in the song he describes himself: “I’m steaming like a tea pot.” Perhaps Slim Shady didn’t appear out of nowhere. On Infinite, Marshall was trying to show he could become a professional rapper, but something was building pressure beneath the surface. The pot had not yet blown. That boy continued to wait for the bus, unaware he was about to leave the life he knew behind. He will get rich. He will make records that sell. He will never be poor again.

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