He’s headed out with Justin Timberlake on a fourteen-show tour promoted by Live Nation, his most important business partner.
The new album is merely the loud opening salvo in an inescapable cross-promotional barrage. His success is not just a metaphor: It is the product of a canny commercial intelligence.Ĭarter the businessman is working at a creative peak this summer. But behind the bombast and heroic couplets, there is a man named Shawn Carter. There’s a reason why he likes to call himself, among many other things, J-Hova. To a degree that rivals any entertainer, Jay-Z has managed to reconcile the dualities of black and white cultures, Bed-Stuy and Tribeca, art and commerce. A few years ago, he and his wife, Beyoncé Knowles, were photographed in the White House Situation Room, with Jay-Z occupying the chair of President Obama, a fan. When he started out, his lyrics reflected a life not far removed from drug dealing. But that can subtract little from the legacy of Jay-Z the musician, a virtuoso whose evolution traces a broader societal progression. In any event, the critical reception was lukewarm and the downloading process buggy. “I don’t think anyone even cares how good his records are.”
“Jay-Z is bulletproof,” one prominent rock-band manager said with wonder two days after the commercial aired. A total of 1.2 million people downloaded the app, creating a mailing list at the very least and potentially offering something more, like the core audience for a music-streaming service. Though some critics objected to the crass intrusiveness-“If Jay-Z wants to know about my phone calls and e-mail accounts,” the Times’ Jon Pareles groused, “why doesn’t he join the National Security Agency?”-it didn’t much affect his standing with fans.
Before the release, the free app worked as a machine for data-mining and promotion, trading scraps of information, like lyric sheets and cover art, for access to users’ social networks. The deal was about much more, however, than solving a distribution problem. The Wall Street Journal valued the partnership at $20 million-a figure that shocked an industry battered by piracy and declining revenues. Samsung paid $5 each for a million digital copies, assuring the album of platinum status before it even appeared, while also giving Jay-Z the benefit of free advertising.
Viewers were directed to a website, where they could make out-amid stylized redactions-directions that allowed Samsung users to download a free app, which would in turn give them the album five days ahead of its general release. The nature of those rules was revealed in the spot’s final second, when the words SAMSUNG GALAXY flashed on the screen. “We need to write the new rules,” Jay-Z declared. Shot in vérité style, the ad purported to show the artist in his studio, his Brooklyn Nets cap slung backward, as he made gnomic pronouncements to producers Timbaland, Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz, and the graybeard Rick Rubin. Instead, it was announced via a three-minute commercial during game five of the NBA Finals. The release came with little of the usual promotional buildup: no radio single, no Rolling Stone cover. Last week, the twelfth solo studio album by the rapper Jay-Z, Magna Carta … Holy Grail, burst forth from a cloud of calculated obfuscation. I’m not a businessman / I’m a business, man!