Rihanna Walks Off With $25 Million In ‘Milk’ Money From Samsung

Rihanna is one person who’s certainly not crying over her own spilt Milk.

Earlier this week, Samsung announced it was shelving its anemic streaming service, Milk, after a very brief run. This is the same Milk that breathlessly inked a $25 million endorsement deal with Rihanna to promote the digital music app.

Twenty-five million dollars!

That’s a lot of money for absolutely nothing.

Seriously, people, if you Google “rihanna milk samsung,” the only thing that comes up is a story about the original endorsement deal in October, 2015, and several stories about the end of the Milk service this week.

In between? Nothing.

So go, right now, and ask everyone you know, “What is Milk?” At the very least, you’d think, given Rihanna’s international fame, that someone would know that Milk is a Samsung music service. But here’s what happened when I asked savvy media people what Milk is:

“It’s that white stuff you put in coffee when Starbucks tries to charge you for soy milk.”

“It’s that gay San Francisco guy who was shot and they turned it into a good movie.”

“Didn’t Fergie have a song with that title?” (No, that was M.I.L.F., but a lot of milk was consumed in the video, so I understand the confusion).

And, my favorite answer: “I don’t know what Milk is, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with Rihanna because if she was doing her job and endorsing something, I definitely would have heard about it.”

Rihanna has never even tweeted the word “Milk” during her deal. Not a single tweet — the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. She could have posted, “Hey, catch my new song on Milk.” She might have done a 140-character version of “Milk — it’s better in your ears than in your mouth!” She could have even woken up at 4 p.m. after a night of partying at some Apple Music event and tweeted, “Well, it’s too late for a glass of milk — so I’ll just go to Milk on my Samsung phone.”

Forget Twitter. On Instagram, where the singer is most active, she posted more pictures of a Barbados chicken nugget than she did of her own streaming service. She even urged her fans to listen to her new single, “Nothing is Promised” on iTunes and her new video, “Need Me” on VEVO!

Of course, some of the blame for this Rihanna deal has to fall to Samsung itself. The deal with the singer officially centered around some video diary for her LP “Anti” that she was apparently supposed to release exclusively to the phone maker. It’s hard to tell if that ever happened, given that the lone YouTube video linking Samsung and Rihanna has been taken down “due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement.”

Rihanna did post two tweets that mentioned Samsung last year — and both included links that indeed sent readers to a music streaming service.

Alas, it was Tidal, not Milk.

But why do I even care? It’s not as if I hate Rihanna. Her music inspires fans all over the globe. But there’s something far larger at stake here than a lame streaming service that didn’t know how to make a dent in an industry dominated by the lame iTunes and the even worse Tidal.

The issue here is the over-inflated value of celebrity. Someone at Samsung obviously believed that giving Rihanna $25 million would reflect back millions in fame and fortune on Milk.

But if you lay down with a celebrity, you wake up with whatever fleas that celebrity is interested in at any particular moment. In Rihanna’s case, that includes marijuana, LeBron James, Puma sneakers, Manolo Blahnik shoes, herself and her breasts.

In the end, the only thing about Milk that we’ll remember is the name — which is what happens when Milk gets milked.

She's laughing all the way to the bank like …..

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