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Jay-Z defends Best Buy deal, it’s about the leakers

By | Published on Wednesday 3 August 2011

Jay-Z

Jay-Z has defended his decision to sign up to exclusivity deals in the US for the sale of his and Kanye West’s new album ‘Watch The Throne’.

As previously reported, numerous indie record shop owners put their name to a letter last week criticising the rappers for getting into bed with iTunes and Best Buy for the digital and physical releases respectively, depriving them of the opportunity to sell the new record.

But Z says that, while he does feel a little bad about pissing off the indie record sellers of America, his and West’s decision to do exclusivity deals with two retailers on this release was mainly an effort to stop the record from leaking online. Which is basically him saying indie record shop employees are more likely to illegally post unreleased records onto the internet. I don’t think that will mend any broken relationships.

Speaking to New York radio station Hot 97, he said: “I feel a little bad about it, but at the same time we made this album, we took eight months, we should be able to release it the way we like without everyone being up in arms. The real reason behind it was because we didn’t want the music to leak, we wanted to present it to the people – we were thinking about the people in its entirety”.

He continued: “When you send it out to physical [stores], it pretty much, once it leaves the plant, it’s on the truck and that’s the end of it. And it has to go like two weeks before it goes to stores. That’s not gonna happen, [so the album’s] not gonna leak. We took great care to make sure it’s not leaking at all”. So there you have it.



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