How Jay-Z appealed to Millennials for the release of Magna Carta Holy Grail

August 6, 2013 | Blog | By Lightbox

When Jay-Z announced his twelfth studio album, titled Magna Carta Holy Grail, he let the world know in a most unusual way.  During Game 5 of the NBA Finals, a Samsung commercial aired that introduced the album and showed Jay-Z working in the studio with top name producers.

How did this target millennials, you may ask? Well, Samsung revealed it had purchased the rights to the first one million copies of the album. Owners of the Samsung Galaxy S III, Galaxy S 4, and Galaxy Note II simply had to download the Magna Carta app from June 24-July 3. The album would then be released on July 4th to the first one million users who had downloaded the app. That’s five days ahead of the general album release!

Three reasons why I (a millennial) think this is brilliant:

  1. It’s the first time an artist has tried (and succeeded) to market their brand this way. Partnering with a tech company is the best way for Jay-Z to stay ahead of market trends. His team even created their own hashtag for this movement forcing the music industry to set #NewRules.
  2. Offering the exclusive opportunity to download days before the general release date builds hype around the album for those who don’t own the required Samsung Galaxy phones.
  3. Creating an app as the means of delivering the album really shows that Jay-Z and his team understand how millennials want to use and consume content. As millennials, we are attached to our devices and constantly want to stay plugged into our social media worlds. With this new way of marketing a user can download the album and immediately let followers know about it on their social networks, which also appeals to our desire to have everything at the touch of our fingertips.
There has been some backlash since the release of the album through the Magna Carta app. The question of privacy is being raised as the app is asking for more data than some are comfortable giving up. The app has since been removed from the Google Play store where over 500,000 people downloaded it.

I’m usually one to avoid giving too much data so I would probably wait until the general release date to listen. How about you? If Jay-Z and his team created #NewRules and more artists go to market this way, is it worth giving up some private information to be one of the first to hear your favorite artist’s new album? How do you envision music industry marketers using this information?

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