In the meantime, Jay stepped down from his administrative role at Def Jam in 2007. Between 2005-2012, Rihanna released seven albums with Def Jam, and during that time, she became one of the biggest stars in the world - and one of the best-selling artists of all time - moving more than 200 million units internationally, and racking up more than 100 million Gold & Platinum song certifications, according to the Recording Industry Association Of America, aka the RIAA.
Six months later, the first of those albums, Music Of The Sun, arrived in stores.
Rihanna did sign the deal, agreeing to deliver six albums for Def Jam. Or through this window …” And we were on the 29th floor. And Jay Z said, “There’s only two ways out. Per Rihanna’s account, “The audition definitely went well” - although the story as she tells it sounds a little uncomfortable in retrospect: Jay had been appointed president and CEO of Def Jam only months earlier, and he met with Rihanna in the label’s Manhattan offices. In late 2004, the Barbadian singer was shopping her newly recorded demo, and Jay was the first label executive to respond. Jay Z has been overseeing Rihanna’s career since February 2005, right around the time of her 17th birthday. But before we deal with all that, let’s back up a little bit so we can get a better idea of just how we arrived at this impossibly strange and troubling place. It’s an unconventional, even counterintuitive approach - one that seems to prioritize platinum plaques above actual revenue - and it’s cloaked in confusion, secrecy, and conflicts of interest. How would that work exactly? Well, either as part of the $25 million pact or through an unrelated additional purchase, some undisclosed sum would be used to buy one million digital copies of ANTI (at a reduced bulk rate) from Jay’s Roc Nation Records, and those downloads would be given away, one at a time, to the first million customers who went to Tidal and typed in the appropriate access code. And among other things, that sponsorship would guarantee that Rihanna’s eighth album, ANTI, would go platinum on its day of release. Looking back now, though, it seems equally likely Jay was meeting with Samsung to finalize the details of a $25 million sponsorship of his Roc Nation Management company’s prize star: Rihanna. It’s a hypothesis that made sense in the moment and still makes sense today: Tidal has been something of a noble failure since its dramatic relaunch in March 2015. That bit of news led to speculation that Jay was in talks with Samsung to sell his newly acquired streaming service, Tidal, to the South Korean company. Last October, Jay Z was photographed exiting Samsung’s Silicon Valley offices, where he’d reportedly taken a meeting with Daren Tsui, the vice president of music at Samsung Media Solutions Center.