radio stations had already begun streaming the new album—hurting the
exclusivity for which Samsung had paid millions and had promised to
owners of Galaxy phones.
“Magna Carta Holy Fail?” joked a writer at the website Contently.
Finally, around 2:00 A.M., two hours after the promised release, the
downloads kick-started.
Pendleton, as usual, managed to see the bright side of the disaster:
Demand for the album was so overwhelming that the servers couldn’t keep
up.
Still, the debacle exposed the risks of high-profile celebrity deals
without the capabilities to back them up.
“There’s a reason why Twitter rang out with cries of #SamsungFail, and
not #JayZfail, after all,” wrote Contently’s Henry T. Casey.
Nearly a week later, Jay-Z appeared on a radio talk show in New York
and called the experience “disheartening” and “not cool” but played up the
incredible demand for the album, without blaming his sponsor.
“It was twenty million hits for the app and it broke,” he said. “No one is
expecting it, there’s no way in the world for you to calculate twenty million
hits. It’s not even a number you can fathom. You cannot prepare a service
for that.”
Jay-Z didn’t get everything he wanted. Billboard never did change its
rules to account for the Samsung–Jay-Z alliance. But the Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA) was forced to change the way it
measured sales. And after the album went on sale through traditional
channels three days later, the album hit the Billboard number one spot
instantly, selling 528,000 copies in the first week.