INTRODUCTION

Empire State of Mind begins with Jay-Z’s early childhood and includes interviews with people from the housing project he grew up to set the stage for his unprecedented success as one the world’s most successful entrepreneurs of all time. He is a rapper, but he is first and foremost a business. The story begins in 1969 when Shawn Corey Carter, more commonly known as Jay-Z, was born in the Marcy housing projects of Brooklyn, New York. Jay-Z didn’t start producing music until he was 26, which made him more mature. Reasonable Doubt, his first album, had a life-time of experiences in one CD. By waiting, his words meant more and there was a greater complexity to his music. 

EARLY LIFE

Jay-Z struggled early in life. His father, and role model, left him at the age of 10 and from then on he struggled to let anyone become close to him so he was never hurt like that again. At the age of 17, Jay-Z shot his older brother while under the influence of drugs for stealing a ring. Jay-Z put the incident in music in his second album with the verses, “Saw the devil in your eyes, high off more than weed/ Confused, I just closed my young eyes and squeezed.” His brother never pressed charges and reconciled the next day. More than a decade later, Jay-Z finally made the decision to quit drugs and stop running away from the cops on the streets of Brooklyn. Jay-Z elaborates this process in verse by saying, “I sold kilos of coke, I’m guessing I could sell CDs.” 

NEW FOUND SUCCESS IN MUSIC

Sure enough, Jay-Z left his shady past behind him and built a commercial hip-hop empire unparalleled by anyone else. This empire encompassed music, film, liquor, and a clothing company. He later expanded his empire to basketball shoes, the Brooklyn Nets NBA Basketball team, a 4-star restaurant and Night Club in New York, and helped launch the careers of other artists such as Kanye West and Rihanna.

Jay-Z’s number one selling album, Blueprint 3, has an interesting history to it. Jay-Z bought back the rights to a future album, soon to be Blueprint 3, from the Def Jam record label. All 60 minutes and 44 seconds of this album were recorded on an iPod, an iPod he lost on the plane back from Hawaii. Luckily his music was not bootlegged and his work paid off as Blueprint 3 became his best-selling album selling 476,000 copies in the first week.  

SPREADING THE WEALTH

Jay-Z is worth over $550 million, but besides reinvesting his money, he has also donates his money. Some examples include: the Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation for underprivileged kids to attend college, a documentary series called, The Diary of Jay-Z; Water for Life, which focused on his trip to Africa to raise awareness regarding the world’s water crisis. And most recently, he teamed up with other celebrities to raise $57 million for Haiti Earthquake aid.    

COLLABORATION WITH BING: MASTERING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Another large portion of this book discusses the collaboration between Bing and Jay-Z to simultaneously promote each other’s products. In 2010, Bing sought an opportunity to introduce the world to their search engine through an integrated experience of music, technology, and literature. Jay-Z is not just a rapper, but an innovative entrepreneur that has been known to seize opportunities available for expansion of his brand and products. Jay-Z was approached by Bing prior to the release of his book. For Bing, the goal was meant to increase user ratings through an integrated experience of different information technologies. As it was described by Gerard Nussbaum in the trade journal titled, “Information technology: Opening the box,” for information technology to be successful in collaborative setting, companies must engage their own workforce as well as the audience. He later emphasizes that if a business, such as Bing, is able to engage users in various industries, then they will have a much larger market share of success than if they focused on only one aspect. Bing and Jay-Z combined their specialties to create a multi-media experience and perfect this aspect described by Nussbaum. For Jay-Z on the other hand, the project was meant to build the hype of his anticipated release of Decoded, Jay-Z’s autobiography. Bing tied the whole experience together by creating an online game of taking pictures and locating each page that was spotted around the world.

In a collaborative effort worldwide, every page was located and uploaded to Bing, where it could be read before Decoded even hit stores. Bing used their Bing Maps to allow people in Europe to locate the exact street location of each and every page in New York City, San Francisco etc. and vice versa. Bing then expanded their campaign by incorporating the social media and networking sites of Twitter, Facebook, and radio. Once every page of the book had been located and recorded, Bing digitally assembled Decoded prior to the book’s release.

Some of the immediate impacts seen by Bing and Jay-Z through their efforts included: the average time per visit on the interactive digital game on Bing’s website was over 10 minutes, in just one month Bing saw an 11.7% increase in visits to their website, for the first time ever, Bing entered the Global Top 10 Most Visited Sights, Jay-Z’s Facebook followers grew by over one million people, Decoded remained on the bestsellers list for 19 straight months, and Jay-Z’s success was covered by every major news outlet from Oprah to the late night shows. Bing and Jay-Z both became part of the pop-culture conversation as the campaign alone earned 1.1 billion media impressions.

By integrating the information technologies of music, business, literature, search engines, social media, radio, television interviews, and word of mouth, the campaign designed by Bing and Jay-Z found extraordinary success. Today’s culture is built around communication and the most successful way to promote a product is through integrating all forms of technologies available. The success story of Jay-Z’s collaboration with Bing is just one example of how Jay-Z went from street corner to corner office.

THE JAY-Z BRAND AND EMPIRE

Jay-Z is unlike any entrepreneur the world has ever seen. He left violence and drugs in his past and put him in position for a future with minimal limitations. Jay-Z built an empire from a wide range of information technologies including: his personality to reach out to those in need, his innovative nature to use social media and search engine sites to expand his networks, and lastly, his unwavering desire to influence entertainment through music, literature, culture, and sports. Jay-Z’s success is mainly attributable to what is described as “lifestyle marketing.” This term is mentioned in the course reader as well as in the trade journal, written by Ronald Richman, titled, “Lifestyle marketing; reaching the new American consumer.” Lifestyle marketing is defined as a technique used by companies to tap into a person’s lifestyle and interests through customizing their marketing strategies to meet the everyday activities of the potential customer (Richman, 2003). Jay-Z has been an entrepreneur that has found extreme success in anticipating what people want, before they even know they want it. Jay-Z demonstrated lifestyle marketing methods through implementing his products in combined efforts with search engines and social media sites, which has brought him extreme wealth.

Steve Forbes describes Jay-Z as a legendary entrepreneur such as Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates, as he encompasses the passion and ability to imagine what doesn’t exist, and then the pure self-discipline to make it happen. Forbes later compares him to Thomas Edison as his work requires “one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration” and the desire to control his own destiny. From street corner to corner office, Empire State of Mind tells it all.