Jay-Z’s deal with Samsung signals an evolution of artist-brand partnerships

On Sunday Samsung revealed via a three-minute advert during the NBA finals that Jay-Z would release his new album Magna Carta Holy Grail exclusively on Samsung devices via a special app that will be available on the Google Play store to the first million users on Samsung mobile devices from 72 hours before the official release. The interesting portion of the deal is that those users will be given the album by Samsung in full, the electronics giant paid the musician $5 per copy, making Jay-Z around $5m dollars in the process. And that is excluding any additional cash received from Samsung for other commitments towards the brand.

This on top of the free advertising the album received from the Samsung NBA final advert itself, a spot that can cost upwards of $1 million per minute. This is the kind of advertising power that even the likes of Universal Music can’t afford these days, whilst it’s perfectly in Samsung’s reach given that they spend billions per year on marketing.

This deal is more than just a pure association between a brand and a popular name to make it “cool”; it provides value to both the artist (ehm, I’ve mentioned the $5m right?) and the consumers who get a free album from the campaign. It also signals a potential new trend for world-famous recording artists working in a world where incomes from recorded music are declining. They may end up looking at brands more frequently to add substance to the bottom line of recorded music revenues.

The giveaway is unlikely to be chart-elegible as an analyst for Nielsen Entertainment pointed out to Reuters, and it will be interesting to see whether the giveaway will in any way cannibalize sales in the US, although for that to happen you’d need a pretty large portion of Jay-Z fans to also own Samsung mobile devices.