Getting Jay Z's New Album, Copyrights Be Damned

Jay Z’s latest album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, was pre-released last week to a lucky 1 million fans. Samsung singlehandedly handed Jay Z a platinum record, buying 1 million downloads at $5 per, downloadable only on Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets. But the promotion backfired on Samsung, causing a virtual free-for-all online and creating a case study in music piracy.

After one day, there were more than 200,000 illegal downloads of MCHG on torrent sites alone. What happened? The answers are instructive for future promotions. Once the album was available on torrent sites (as it was bound to be) 4 days ahead of this week’s official release, fans who might have otherwise paid for it couldn’t resist. They needed it now and downloaded it for free, though illegally, online.

Then there were the millions of Jay Z fans who wanted the album who didn’t own Samsung hardware. The limited, advance availability was just one reason for the debacle. Samsung’s servers were so jammed after the pre-release that even those fans who could have downloaded Jay Z’s album legitimately turned to torrent sites. The relative difficulty in downloading content legally versus the ease of obtaining it illegally from pirate sites or simply ripping it was an initial reason that piracy became a problem relatively early in the digital era. The difficulty of obtaining MCHG showed that consumers will still follow the path of least resistance, copyrights be damned.

Other fans were turned off by the great deal of consumer information demanded at the official Samsung site. Samsung’s app even initially asked users for the phone’s status and identity. Once installed, it required a working log-in to Facebook FB +0.6% or Twitter, and information to post on the account. In addition, to “unlock” certain hidden lyrics, you needed basically to spam your friends.

Many Jay Z fans bristled at disclosing personal information to Samsung when they could find another way to download MCHG illegally but for free. Maybe Jay Z had already made enough off of Samsung, they reasoned. So what difference did it make if they simply downloaded it for free?

We all know where this is going. There really never is a free lunch. Samsung wanted the personal consumer information. That was the cost of the album. Here, the artist (Jay Z) was a winner. He went platinum before the album even officially dropped and made $5 million to boot. Samsung, because people will not pay for content if there is an alternative, was a loser. The company bungled the launch and in the process, alienated both their own users and Jay Z’s fans. What about the music? The early reviews of Magna Carta Holy Grail were not great, but when the seller is a trusted brand, huge advance sale deals are still there for the taking.