Jay-Z has gone head-to-head with the best of them.

The rap titan popularized Italian luxury clothing line Iceburg only to take it all back and start Rocawear after they failed to give him an endorsement deal. He's championed Ace of Spades over Louis Reoderer's Cristal champagne, made hip-hop fans tuck their beloved Mitchell & Ness jerseys in favor of button-up shirts and forced New Yorkers to choose between the Knicks and Nets.

He's battled against Nas, Mobb Deep, Ma$e and Jim Jones, but now, with his new Samsung deal and the release of his 12th LP Magna Carta Holy Grail, Jay may be taking on his biggest challenger yet: the iPhone.

On July 4, Jay will drop Magna Carta for free via a music app accessible only to Samsung Galaxy phone users. Samsung purchased one million digital LPs at a reported $5 per album just so they could obtain the rights, and non-Galaxy users will be able to buy the album three days later. The window of exclusivity that Hov and Samsung offer has created heavy buzz, but is it enough to push Samsung into the forefront of a smartphone market led by Apple?

"One pattern with Jay-Z and a lot of the companies that he does deals with is that they're basically trying to buy cool. A lot of the time he goes with brands that are not necessarily the #1 in the category," says Zack O'Malley Greenburg, Forbes magazine senior editor and author of "Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went From Street Corner to Corner Office." He ...

To some, Dwight Howard is an overpaid, slightly petulant manchild who routinely quits on teams and believes he is hilarious despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

Slim Thug does not agree with that assessment. The way he sees it, Howard is cream of the NBA's 2013 free agency crop, a misunderstood, marquee player capable of bringing multiple titles to whichever team he signs with. And Thug is determined to make that team his hometown Houston Rockets.

Houston is one of several teams vying for Howard's services, and they're seen by many to be one of the frontrunners, along with the center's former team, the Los Angeles Lakers. The thing is, the Lakers can offer him more money than anyone else ... so Thug has taken it upon himself to alert Howard to some of Houston's many advantages, via a series of inspired tweets that set the Internet ablaze on Monday.

And one day after his initial pitch, Thug was still selling Houston to Howard when he got on the phone with MTV News (ironically, he was calling from Los Angeles).

"I was trying to tell him the best things, from my standpoint; I know the Rockets ran a lot of good things by him [in their pitch to the big man], but I was talking in terms of women," Thug told MTV News. "Obviously he loves women, and if you love women, Houston is a great place, D. I seen your baby mama on 'Basketball Wives,' and there's plenty out here that are way better than her ...

Iggy Azalea is gearing up to release her debut album The New Classic and the Australia native's adventurous road to release had made her this month's MTV Artist to Watch.

In the year since she signed with T.I.'s Grand Hustle label and later added a deal with Island Def Jam to the fold, the 23-year-old admits that she's had time to discover herself as an artist and hone in on the music she really wants to make.

It's clear, even from the visuals that have accompanied her recent singles "Work" and "Bounce" that she's doing things on her own terms. For the Bollywood-themed "Bounce" video, Iggy hoped to have her boss and mentor T.I. make a cameo, but getting him all the way to India proved to be an issue.

"I shot my new video in India and I did invite him but he couldn't make it because it takes a really long time to actually obtain a visa [for] India," she told MTV News. "I invited him a week before. I didn't realize it takes so long, so he couldn't come with me when I shot my video in India."

"Bounce" followed the video for "Work," which Iggy based on one of her favorite Australian film's "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," (in addition to a little influence from OutKast and Quentin Tarantino).

"I really liked this film as a kid and always identified with it because it's [about] drag queens and they have to keep stopping in small rural towns and they're not accepted," she explained to MTV News. "I ...

One Direction have always had a slightly dirty sense of humor about their clean-cut image. While they don't have the hard-partying reputation of The Wanted, with an album dubbed Take Me Home, they can be naughty when they want to be.

Occasionally photographed leaving a nightclub or with a new rumored love interest, the fab five aren't afraid to be open about who they are, even with the flashing lights of a photographer's lens never far away.

"I don't think we've ever tried to be squeaky-clean. Nobody's perfect," Liam Payne says in Glamour magazine's August cover story.

"The thing is, when you're playing a part, eventually it goes wrong," Harry Styles added. "Eventually someone's going to see that that's not who you are. So it's best to be yourself from the get-go."

But they admit that when they're constantly away from home, it can be hard to stay in touch with themselves. While traveling across the country for their Take Me Home Tour, they're learning how to balance their personal and professional lives.

"Yeah, it's something that is quite hard — people being a bit rude to [ex-girlfriend Danielle Peazer] on the Internet. And it's a challenge having a relationship on the road," Payne explained. (Payne and Peazer reportedly broke up back in May.) "Credit to anybody that does it, really."

But some of the guys are doing it. Zayn Malik (who recently got a tattoo of his girlfriend, Little Mix's Perrie Edward) and Louis Tomlinson are two members that have found a way to find time for both long term love ...

The Wanted certainly know a thing or two about having a good time. The party-loving boy band/reality TV stars will celebrate those late nights by painting the town red on their next single, "We Own the Night."

Their manager, Scooter Braun, confirmed the single to MTV News last Friday. "We Own the Night" is the group's official U.S. single off their next album and follow-up to

"I love [it]. It is an anthem; it is an anthem for anyone who ever had a drink and a good time. It's a perfect Wanted song, but it's like... it's them. It's a little British to it," Braun said of the track, slated for release by early August. "It's a little bit of everybody at the bar will be singing this at the top of their lungs [type song]. And it's just a really great, great record. I play it around the office and people just go 'What is that?' And they love it. When the boys finished it, we all listened to it and they said 'This is the record we've been looking for — because this is us,' "

Having already made a name for themselves with fist-pumping tracks like "Glad You Came" and "Chasing The Sun," the recently reunited group thinks that this next album, which follows 2011's Battleground, really defines who they are as a group.

Justin Bieber To Appear On The Wanted's 'Best Album Yet'

"They had a bunch of records that wasn't them and now we have the album that we feel like is them," Braun ...

While eagerly awaiting a release date for Against Me!'s upcoming record, Transgender Dysphoria Blues, fans of the punk band can take in a slew of solo shows courtesy of frontwoman Laura Jane Grace (née Tom Gabel).

Grace — who came out as transgender via a feature story in Rolling Stone last year and later sat down with MTV News for her first on-camera interview since the revelation — announced a collection of shows in the coming months on the East Coast. Laura Jane Grace Sings the Transgender Dysphoria Blues kicks off in Philadelphia on August 10 and wraps up just five days later in New York.

Against Me! previously canceled its Spring tour with Bad Religion and Polar Bear Club, due, in part, to the departure of their drummer, Jay Weinberg. Their bassist, Andrew Seward, departed the band soon after.

The lineup of the band has shifted in the past few months, with NOFX's Fat Mike and drummer Adam "Atom" Willard coming on to jam during recording sessions.

The next concert the band has scheduled to play under the Against Me! name is during Chicago's Riot Fest in September, but it's unclear who will be appearing onstage.

While the band itself has been ostensibly on the DL for the past few months — working on their upcoming album — Grace has had her share of press, notably appearing in Cosmopolitan magazine to dish on her first year as a woman and on MTV's House of Style to chat about the challenges of ...

Nelly and Pharrell Williams already have proven chemistry, but adding Nicki Minaj to their mix on Durrty's latest single, perfected the recipe.

"We're just trying to stir the pot," Nelly told MTV News of his new track when he walked the red carpet at the 2013 BET Awards on Sunday night.

The single officially drops on iTunes on Tuesday (July 2), but the St. Lunatic has been sitting on the song for more than a year. Originally the track just featured him and the Neptunes producer, but then he had an idea. "Actually, me and Pharrell did the record maybe about a year ago and we were coming back to the records that we did, closing out the album and putting everything together and I was just like, 'Yo I think Nicki might be dope on this'," he told us. "We made it happen and I was right. She killed it!"

While the track immediately conjures up memories of Nelly and Pharrell's 2002 "Hot in Herre" and their 2005 hit "Flap Your Wings," Nicki adds in some remarkable rap bars. "You should follow my example, bitch I.E./ 'Cause I'm front row Isaac Miz-ra-hi," she spits, putting extra emphasis on her words, by breaking down her rhymes into simple syllables.

In order to match Nicki's spirited verses, Nelly also confirmed to MTV News that director Collin Tilley has already shot an equally "energetic" video, which should be ready in a week or so.

If Batman is more than just a man, then surely he's more than just any one actor. That's a belief that Bruce Wayne would sign off on, and it's one that Christian Bale agrees with as well.

Fans holding out hope that Bale might reprise his iconic role for upcoming DC Comics-based feature films — like the oft-rumored "Batman/Superman" team-up flick, or even the more ambitious -style "Justice League" — can stop holding their breaths now: the Oscar-winning actor has made it official that his time in the bat-suit is ending.

"It's a torch that should be handed from one actor to another," Bale told EW.com when asked if he would reprise Batman for the rumored "Justice League" movie. "I enjoy looking forward to what somebody else will come up with."

While Bale's latest comments suggest that letting Batman go was an easy decision, his past remarks tell a different story. When MTV News spoke with the actor ahead of Bale spoke to the hot rumor of that moment: that Batman would die at the end of "Rises." Bale admitted that Bruce Wayne needed to fall hard in order for Christopher Nolan's trilogy to have an impact, but he stopped short of saying he wanted to see the character meet his demise.

"Not from an acting point of view," he said with a smile when asked if Bruce should die. "Not from any desire to never have to act again. I've enjoyed immensely playing the role."

But even then, Bale openly admitted that he was "very intrigued ...