Jay-Z has paired up with Samsung to promote a solo album “Magna Carta Holy Grail” that will be sent out “for free” to the first 1 million users of a unique app that’ll only work on select Samsung devices. This release is part of a multi-million-dollar deal that was rumored earlier this year between the artist and the smart device brand, here revealing itself immediately before the Half Time Show during Game 5 of the NBA Finals, 2013.
“We don’t have any rules, everyone’s trying to figure it out. That’s why the internet’s like the wild west. The wild, wild west. We need to write the new rules.
The album is about, like this duality of how do you navigate through this whole thing, through success, through failures, through all this and remain yourself.”
Samsung has likely had this deal in motion for a long, long time, as an album of this magnitude doesn’t appear overnight. Speaking through this 3-minute ad-like video spot, Jay-Z teams up with names like Rick Rubin, Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz and Timbaland to produce an album that’ll drop on a wide scale in an instant.
According to the Wall Street Journal Samsung agreed to pay $5 USD per album – that’s a total of $5,000,000 – certainly just a small portion of the cash the artist is receiving in this deal that’ll continue to unfold through the summer.
The Magna Carta app is also said to be an “unprecedented inside look into the album [with] personal stories and inspiration in tow. The contents of this app will also be able to be shared “with other Galaxy
owners” via Facebook, Twitter, and S Beam. We’ll see soon if that means the whole album or just the behind-the-scenes looks. Sooner than later!
ou’ll see a Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 displaying a couple of “behind the scenes” bits that you can safely assume will be included in the Magna Carta app.
