When It Comes To Jay-Z, Are You Cool?

By Staff in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 10, 2013 6:00PM

Are you one of the lucky ones to be the first to download Jay-Z's latest album for free on your Samsung phone or tablet?

If you haven't heard by now, Magna Carta...Holy Grail has gone platinum before it even hit store shelves as 1 million Samsung phone and tablet users had the chance to get the new album on Independence Day without having to pay extra to download it.

Samsung reportedly paid $5 a copy to make it available to owners of their devices without having to pay money for it. However, before in order to download the album, users had to download the Magna Carta...Holy Grail app, and that's where the word "free" starts to get obscured.

No one should be surprised that when a user downloads and uses the app, they allow Samsung to collect a wide swath of information about the owner of the phone, how they use it, what they use it for, where they take that phone, how long they use it, what time they use it, how many times they read Chicagoist with it ... and the list continues. It's outlined in the app's privacy policy which anyone can see and read. Before the app is downloaded, Samsung informs the user to the access being granted to the company. It led Killer Mike to send out a Tweet saying "Nah... I'm cool." as he opted out. However, there are at least a million people out there who weren't cool and just had to get that album.

Now the real motive for Samsung to agree to buy a million copies of Magna Carta...Holy Grail becomes a bit more clear. Samsung hasn't shelled out $5 million to Jay-Z in the hopes people run out and buy a new phone. It's an unrealistic expectation. Why would someone pay a few hundred dollars for a new phone to save the $12 or $13 it costs to buy the new Jay-Z? Is getting Magna Carta five days before everyone else really that important to that many people to make them switch to a new phone? There is no way Samsung could hope to recoup the money it handed over to Jay-Z in that manner. Samsung now has a much more valuable currency with this deal, and that is the information it collects from all those users who downloaded the app and album. Information which is also very valuable to who knows how many other people who will pay good money for it.

Guess what? The privacy policy tells you Samsung has plans to sell that information to third parties. It does not do a very good job explaining who those parties might be, however. Reading that privacy policy is headache inducing, and we're sure it's done on purpose—to discourage people from actually understanding to what they are agreeing.m Is there a reason for that?

In the ads for Magna Carta...Holy Grail, Jay-Z tells us the Internet is the Wild West and "new rules have to be written."

That's fine and good, but are these new rules really any better?

This writer is going to side with Killer Mike on this one. We're cool and not comfortable with the arrangement. Protecting personal information is important and it's getting harder and harder to do. We're certainly not going to give it away in order to get our hands on a new Jay-Z album a few days early and keep $12 in my pocket. We won't do it for any album for that matter. The price isn't worth it to us.

If it's worth it to you, then we can groove on that and we hope you enjoy the new album.
We hate to go Andy Rooney on you all, but we think we'd prefer to wait the few days, go to our local record store, buy the album on a nice piece of vinyl and listen to it at home. Sure you pay a few bucks to a handful of middle men and 10 percenters, but they don't care who you call, what you're texting or when you use your phone. And if you pay with cash, they don't even know your name.

Then again, according to an e-mail inquiry we sent to a local record store, they don't even know if Magna Carta...Holy Grail is going to be available on vinyl.

Wha???

By: Casey Moffitt