[4] The album features appearances from Jay-Z, T-Pain, Fabolous, Robin Thicke, Busta Rhymes, Juelz Santana, Babyface, Bobby V, and Kanye West, among others.

Lil Wayne stated that producers would include The Alchemist, Cool & Dre, Deezle, Jim Jonsin, Just Blaze, Kanye West, Mannie Fresh, The Runners, Timbaland, Danja, and will.i.am.

[9][10][11] In an interview with HipHopCanada.com, Solitair of the Black Jays stated that he and Cipha Sounds produced a track called "Outstanding", which later eventually leaked.

[15] The album features guest appearances by Fabolous,[16] T-Pain, Brisco, Bobby V, Babyface, Betty Wright, Static Major, Robin Thicke, Jay-Z,[17] Juelz Santana,[18] and Busta Rhymes.

[23]Tha Carter III's lead single, "Lollipop", peaked at number one on the US Billboard Hot 100, staying at the top for three weeks.

On July 24, 2008, Abkco Music Inc. filed a lawsuit against Lil Wayne for copyright infringement and unfair competition, specifically referring to the track "Playing with Fire".

[36][37][38] In March 2011, producer Deezle (Darius Harrison) sued Wayne and his parent labels Cash Money Records over unpaid royalties from Tha Carter III album.

[40] In early June 2011, another producer named David Kirkwood filed a lawsuit against Young Money Entertainment and Cash Money Records on claims that the labels have failed to pay him over $1.5 million in royalties and production services for his work on the album, also including his songwriting on "Love Me or Hate Me", a bonus song featured only on the deluxe edition of the album.

[41] Also in June 2011, Dallas producers Play-N-Skillz filed a lawsuit against him claiming Wayne owed them at least $1 million in unpaid royalties for "Got Money" from Tha Carter III.

He breaks language down into building blocks for new metaphors, exploiting every possible semantic and phonetic loophole for humour and yanking pop culture references into startling new contexts".

[45] Rolling Stone writer Jody Rosen commended its themes and stated "This isn't a mixtape, it's a suite of songs, paced and sequenced for maximum impact".

[25] Jon Pareles of The New York Times commented that Wayne "has clearly worked to make 'Tha Carter III' a statement of its own: one that moves beyond standard hip-hop boasting (though there's plenty of that) to thoughts that can be introspective or gleefully unhinged".

[51] Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal stated, "he distills the myriad metaphors, convulsing flows, and vein-splitting emotions into a commercially gratifying package".

[49] In his consumer guide for MSN Music, critic Robert Christgau noted that "every track attends to detail" and quipped, "From the start you know this is no mixtape because it's clearer and more forceful".

[50] Mosi Reeves of Paste gave it a favorable review and noted that the album "hearkens to when rap meant rapp: Isaac Hayes talking for days about some girl he broke with, or Bobby Womack signifying while strumming a blues guitar".

Freedom du Lac commended Wayne for his "impulses to be outrageous and unconventional", calling him a "nonsensical genius", but found the album "uneven".

Judged, however, as a collection of singles and quotable verses—the criteria on which we've been grading hip-hop records since the end of disco—Tha Carter III is an agonizing piece of work".

[55] Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times found it "scattershot", stating "When Wayne's mad alchemy works, Tha Carter III evinces shades of brilliance that merit the wild hype, but in its transparent attempts to define its era, it fails, falling victim to the imperial bloat of its big-budget mishmash of styles".

[27] Slant Magazine's Dave Hughes viewed that it lacks a "focus" as an album, and stated, "while there are a lot of […] great moments here, Carter III is not the definitive statement of Wayne's mastery that he clearly intended it to be".

[58] Eric R. Danton of the Hartford Courant said of Lil Wayne, "If his raspy, cartoonish voice didn't mark him as different, his quick wit, offhanded wordplay and quirky subject matter should have in a genre populated largely by grim-faced imitators".

[59] Other reviews are average or mixed: Chase Hoffberger of The Austin Chronicle gave the album three stars out of five and said, "It's Wayne's personality that both floats and sinks TCIII".

[60] Kilian Murphy of Hot Press also gave it a score of three out of five and stated, "Gifted MC loses the run of himself without Mannie Fresh".

[61] Lewis P. of Sputnikmusic likewise gave it a score of three out of five and said the album "is scattershot, which oddly strengthens its faults, as if any lull in quality means that the next batch of producers can just reset the formula".

[62] (However, nearly three years later, in 2011, Alex Robertson of the same website gave the album a score of four-and-a-half out of five and said it was "sort of a miracle: it's way too weird and confusing to be on the mainstream rap charts--to be that record that everyone knows about--but it is anyway.

[77] In its second week, the album dropped to number two on the chart, behind Coldplay's Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends, selling an additional 309,000 copies.

[78] By the end of 2008, Tha Carter III had sold approximately 2.88 million copies and it was named the best-selling album of the year in the United States by Billboard.