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!

Jay z on to the next one song download