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So last night Jay-Z stole the spotlight from everything else going on, as he announced that he would be dropping another album, Magna Carta Holy Grail in 17 days. I clicked play on the video. Timbaland + Swizz Beatz + Pharrell + Rick Rubin + Hov?!

I was all like:

I proceeded to turn my speakers all the way up and replayed those 3 minutes and 3 seconds about 20 times. I was anxious. 

Then this morning, per usual I headed to my Twitter timeline and there it was … blasphemy!

Tweets on my screen saying Mr. Carter is not being a visionary, and others calling him a sellout for doing a deal where Samsung reportedly already paid him $5 milli for the album to distribute it for free to one million of their customers. Now before I continue I’ll give you a sample of what I saw, a cordial debate between blogger, LowKey and DJ A-trak, who stated he thought the deal was “corny.”

Tuh!

For over a decade music artists and record labels have been stumped on how to master sales with this shit called the internet in existence. In case you thought your 99 cents per single was doing something, I’m here to tell you it’s not, at least for artist like Jay-Z who once held album signings at the Virgin Mega store in NYC’s Times Square.

The man has come up with a way to practically go platinum before his release date. If he wasn’t Jay-Z I’m sure a deal like this, this massive in size, wouldn’t even be possible. But he is Jay-Z. He worked for this. Must we call him a sell out for utilizing these opportunities?

A blog on slate.com made a good point. In a post, Matthew Yglesias writes:

People use phones and tablets to visit websites, read books, watch TV shows, and listen to songs. If there were certain sites, shows, books, and music that were exclusive to a particular hardware brand that would be a competitive advantage that scaled up in a beneficial way. So you could imagine a future version of the music industry in which there are no record labels, just music divisions of device manufacturing who try to sign up the most appealing artists for their customers.

This may or may not happen. There has been a couple of attempts at taking on this digital music world when it comes to album sales. If you recall Radiohead released one of their albums for free with suggestion for donations. And that came and went, but the fact that Jay-Z is doing a deal like this is “visionary” enough for me. I think he’s at least attempting to open the door, demonstrating a way (especially for hip-hop artists) to be victorious in this “wild WILD west” and at the same time delivering an album that will likely join his awesome discography that soundtracks the lives of many (minus Kingdome Come lol).

It’s a win-win. Magna Carta is surely going to sell with or without Samsung so why not tie in a nice marketing plan to it?

A-trak says Jay-Z connecting with brands that people “naturally connect with him rather than HP, Duracell and Samsung would make sense” but then what would be the point? Sure that’s cool but shouldn’t we want to reach new markets, rather than the expected ones? Perhaps for us over 20-somethings Jay-Z needs to flex his muscles no more, we get it, but there’s a whole bunch of new young consumers to be had in this America of ours and Hova wants to touch them.

This is him being him, actually NOT selling out, still calling on the same producers he’s used since pretty much the beginning of his career, and then taking it even higher. iTunes sales? C’mon, been there done that!

“On to the next one!”

Can we really be mad that Jay-Z is taking advantage of being Jay-Z? I say, cut the shit and let my man be great! 

Evanka Williamson is the Weekend Editor for GlobalGrind.com. Follow her on twitter, @LOVEvanka