A little over a month ago, the photo to the left surfaced online of Mark Zuckerberg meeting with Jay-Z. Obviously, Mark Zuckerberg is the visionary behind Facebook, the social networking site people use to impress people who don’t even like them. If any rapper were to begin doing business with Mark and Facebook, it would be Jay-Z.
With Magna Carta Holy Grail, Jay-Z set a lot of trends that some rappers have openly discussed emulating. Magna Carta Holy Grail moved 1 million digital copies as a cell phone app and went platinum in a day. Recognizing slowing album sales, Jay-Z built around it and still sold 500,000 physical first week copies.
Jay-Z already dropped the music video for “Picasso Baby,” but “Holy Grail” has gotten more single treatment and features Justin Timberlake. When it came to the music video, a lot of people still expected a traditional premiere. In the case of artists as big as Jay-Z, that means a television network.
Maybe one day the world will learn to stop trying to guess Jay-Z’s moves. Often times, aspiring hip hop artists upload their music videos to Facebook and only their friends watch them. Because of that, few people would have guessed Jay-Z out of all artists would have premiered his music video on Facebook, but that’s what he wanted people to think and that’s probably why he did it that way. A lot of questions were risen when the above photo hit the internet, today’s “Holy Grail” premiere should answer some of them.
When it comes down to it, Jay-Z is a businessman and a business, man, so he is always thinking outside of the box. Most people spend all day talking about him on Facebook anyway, the site IS the most popular in the world and doubles the views of some television networks, why not drop a music video there? Mark Zuckerberg, for the most part, has kept Facebook out of the music scene, but “Holy Grail” was met with such a positive reaction that some other rapper may try something similar.
So, flood the comment sections with opinions on Jay-Z choosing Facebook to premiere his music video and what this means for the music business as a whole utilizing Facebook more for their promotions.
