Billboard has decided it will not count in its chart tally a million albums that Jay-Z plans to distribute through Samsung as free downloads to owners of its Galaxy mobile phones.
Jay-Z , who has not spoken to reporters about the deal, suggested in a Twitter message that the album downloads should be counted as sales because Samsung paid him for them. The message provoked a debate among bloggers and music writers about what constitutes an album sale.
But Bill Werde, the editorial director of Billboard, made it clear in a column posted on Friday that a promotional giveaway like the one Samsung and Jay-Z have planned is not equivalent to a million customers forking over their hard-earned cash for an album. Mr. Werde noted “nothing was actually for sale â€" Samsung users will download a Jay-branded app for free and get the album for free a few days later after engaging with some Jay-Z content.â€
“Retailers doing one-way deals is a fact of life in the music business,†Mr. Werde wrote. “When Best Buy committed to and paid upfront for 600,000 copies of Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Chinese Democracy’ in 2008, those albums didn’t count as sales â€" not until music fans actually bought them. Had Jay-Z and Samsung charged $3.49 â€" our minimum pricing threshold for a new release to count on our charts â€" for either the app or the album, the U.S. sales would have registered.â€
Mr. Werde added that the decision will not necessarily r! ob Jay-Z of a yet another No. 1 album. His recent albums have all sold 400,000 to 450,000 copies in the first week, easily enough in this market to top the chart.
The magazine’s decision also has no impact on Jay-Z’s profit. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Samsung paid the Brooklyn hip-hop mogul $5 for each download, and since artists generally get paid only a royalty percentage of each wholesale album sale, he may stand to make more from the Samsung deal than he would have selling the albums through his label. Though details of the deal have not been made public, Mr. Werde wrote that it appears that Jay-Z may have “pulled off the nifty coup of getting paid as if he had a platinum album before one fan bought a single copy.â€
In 2007, Prince pulled off a similar feat when he distributed three million copies of his album “Planet Earth†with editions of the The Daily Mail in Britain. People got the albums for free when they bought the newspaper, which had reportedly paid Princ $500,000 over and above the royalties he would have made off each CD. Cutting the label and music distributors out of the deal proved profitable.
It remains to be seen if Jay-Z’s gambit with Samsung will create a new template for distributing music, but some marketing experts are watching the deal closely. Samsung’s advertising budget of $4.6 billion dwarfs anything major record labels can spend, and if Jay-Z ends up selling more albums than he usually does as a result of the partnership, other major stars may follow suit.
