Jay-Z’s ‘Magna Carta Holy Grail’ album cover

Although Nielsen SoundScan and Billboard won’t count the “free” downloads of Jay-Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail toward his first week sales, the RIAA has gladly accepted the rapper’s new rules. To celebrate, he has unveiled the cover of the overhyped album.

SoundScan reps confirmed that the one million free downloads offered to Samsung Galaxy users will not be represented in the opening sales of Magna Carta. Their standing guidelines state that album must be sold by a label, artist or company to a retailer for at least a third of the standard price. Hence, Jay-Z won’t have the luxury of sneaking into history books like Beyonce into people’s songwriting credits.

The members of RIAA, on the other hand, has adjusted their rules to accommodate Magna Carta. Unlike SoundScan, which focuses only on retails sales, the company audits shipments (wholesale) figures to both physical and digital third parties, and prevented the certification of albums within the first thirty days of release to allow potential returns of products to be returned. In case you didn’t know, auditors do not count the sales of albums shipped back to record companies.

Now, with a new era in the industry clearly on the horizon, the RIAA has axed a previous stipulation that stated digital albums would not be eligible for certification within the first thirty days of its releases whereas the similar rules affecting physical products remain unchanged. In other words, the one million digital copies of Magna Carta released for free Samsung Galaxy users on the first day will instantly qualify the album for platinum status.

Watch Jay-Z discuss the music on Magna Carta in one of his many Samsung commercials below:

What do you think of the cover?