Jay-Z Says Samsung App Issues Were 'A Loss' For Magna Carta

'I can't even imagine waiting for Rakim's album at 12 o'clock and I
couldn't get it,' Jay-Z tells Power 105's the Breakfast Club of
Samsung app issues.
If you were one of the many disappointed fans who couldn't download
Magna Carta Holy Grail at midnight on July 4, Jay-Z feels your pain.

On Wednesday (July 10), Hov appeared on New York's Power 105 The
Breakfast Club radio show and expressed his disappointment in the
functionality of the Samsung phone app that was supposed to deliver
his new album to one million fans as soon as the clock struck midnight
on Independence Day.

"I can't even imagine waiting for Rakim's album at 12 o'clock and I
couldn't get it and I downloaded — I did everything right," Jay-Z
said, using the 1980s rap icon to put himself in his fans' shoes. "On
the 24th I downloaded my app, I set it, I watched the clock count down
and at 12 'clock I couldn't get it. For me that's not cool."
Hov announced Magna Carta and then pushed it out in a little more than
two weeks, all the while shouting his "new rules" battle cry. The plan
was for fans to download the MCHG app, get access to some pretty nifty
pre-album content and then on July 4 all be able to experience a
communal moment by downloading the album at the same time, but it
didn't work out that way.

"Anytime you do something different — and you should always try to
push forward in whatever you're doing — it's going to be a problem,"
Jay explained. "The thing that happened with Samsung is a real thing;
it was 20 million hits to the app. I'm not saying 20 million people
hit the app, but we went over a million."

According to the rapper's math — a strong suit for the
multimillionaire mogul — more than a million people tried to access
the app at the same time, and when the album didn't begin to download,
the million-plus fans hit it again and again and again, until the
program buckled under pressure.

"It's not even a number that you can fathom; it's 20 times the amount
we thought was going to happen. So you can't even prepare service for
that, it's very difficult."

Breakfast Club host Angela Yee suggested to Hov that maybe the Samsung
ordeal was a good problem; after all, it speaks largely to the
rapper's popularity. Jay however, didn't see it that way. "It's not a
great problem because you want the fan to get that experience. The
people that waited and downloaded it you want them to have that
experience right away. That was the thing that was disheartening to
me."

Despite the technical issues, Jay-Z still seems to have faith in the
revolutionary distribution method and hopes that artists will continue
to push the envelope. "That's a loss. That has to get better," he
urged. "The next person now knows how to go into it better, which is
cool and that's my job. I took the hit for that."