Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail to go platinum with Samsung's help

Rapper Jay-Z’s upcoming album Magna Carta Holy Grail will go platinum after all, Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has announced. Jay-Z’s album is slated to reach this achievement even before it has released thanks to Samsung purchasing one million digital copies of the album.

RIAA has announced that it is altering its Gold and Platinum (G&P) requirements to accommodate Samsung’s promotional activity with Jay-Z. “It is a novel and creative marketing move and it has rightly stimulated a healthy conversation about the sale’s meaning and implications for the modern music business,” explained Liz Kennedy, Director, Communications and G&P Program, RIAA.

You should’ve seen this meme coming (Jay-Z Image credit: NPR Music)

Earlier, it was required that an album be available for 30 days before it became eligible to get certification. It took into account potential returns of physical products like CDs, cassettes and vinyls that could be shipped to brick and mortar retailers and returned. Weirdly enough, this rule included digital album sales too.

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The Digital Single Award was created in 2004, where sales of digital albums were “virtually non-existent and accounted for a small fraction of overall digital sales.” Nearly a decade later, this isn’t the case anymore. Digital album sales have finally caught on and it was time RIAA changed rules.

“The reality is that how fans consume music is changing, the music business is changing as labels and artists partner with a breathtaking array of new technology services, and the industry’s premier award recognizing artists’ commercial achievement should similarly keep pace,” wrote Kennedy.

It has been reported earlier that there could be issues with the album going platinum, especially since Billboard refusing to acknowledge the downloads being offered by Samsung to a million of its users on a first-come-first-serve basis. Billboard’s Editorial Director Bill Werde had written that it won’t count the downloads, because Samsung wasn’t going to ultimately sell the albums on the phones. So while Billboard refusing to acknowledge the one million digital copies of Magna Carta Holy Grail lying with Samsung is part of Jay-Z’s 99 problems, going platinum isn’t one.