Kanye West at the Cannes Lions festival:
“There would have been no Beats deal without the Samsung deal. It showed the No. 1 company the importance of connecting with culture,” said West. “The reason I said I didn’t like Samsung particularly is because throughout my entire life, because of how my parents raised me, I have to work with the No. 1. I can’t work with anyone but Jay Z, because he’s No. 1. I can’t be with any girl but Kim, because that’s the girl whose pictures I look at the most and get turned on by. I’m not going to represent any company but Louis Vuitton, because that’s No. 1. … Samsung is not quite Apple, but it showed that Jimmy [Iovine] and Dre would be able to connect with the No. 1 influencers.”
From what I can gather, Kanye believes that Apple saw Samsung talking to Jay Z (referring to the deal which included pre-loading of the Magna Carta Holy Grail app/album on Samsung devices, which made Jay Z a ton of money but was pretty dodgy on the whole), freaked out, then rushed off and bought Beats.
For 3 billion dollars.
Oh Kanye.
Sidenote: every time there’s a Kanye-related piece, I can never decide on the bit to quote, because it’s all so bizarre and hilarious. Go read the whole piece, but here’s one more:
“The world as a whole is fucking ugly. The Internet as a whole is fucking ugly, too. But I’m not in the construction business,” he said. “I said to Kevin [Systrom], why don’t you let us redo Instagram? Now, you know, Instagram is nice. It’s nice looking. I’m not knocking it. But just in general, everyone spends all of their time looking at their screens or their phones. And just as a simple task, we could clean that up.”
Yeah, Kevin! Just clean it up!