Songfacts®:

• This is the fourth single from American rapper Jay Z's eleventh studio album, The Blueprint 3 in the US only. Outside of America, Young Forever was released instead.
• The track features guest vocals from producer and rapper Swizz Beatz, who also produced the track.
• Jay-Z first performed the song at his "Answer the Call" benefit concert in Madison Square Garden on September 11, 2009.
• The song samples French dance act Justice's 2007 single "D.A.N.C.E."
• The song's music video, in which Jay-Z, Swizz Beatz and rapper Young Jezzy all appear, was directed by Sam Brown and filmed in November 2009. It debuted shortly after midnight on NBC's New Year's Eve With Carson Daly making it the very first music video of the 2010s.
• The black and white video has provoked controversy thanks to its images of bull horns, crucifixes and skulls and a number of bloggers have claimed that the clip contains satanic and Masonic imagery: Sam Brown denied the rumors in an interview with Vibe magazine. Said Brown: "I'm aware of the stir the video has caused and what people are saying. I think when you're dealing in abstract imagery people are going to want to draw lines between things and make sense of it. However, I've always felt that the viewing public was, in general, extremely visually literate. They don't always want or need things to be spelt out for them. One of the great things about music videos are they can be enjoyed purely visually-it doesn't need to mean anything or make any sense. Conspiracy theory is another thing entirely, and seems to me to be about projecting pre-existing beliefs and desperately looking for things that confirm them. There is imagery in this video that is drawn from all over the place. None of it is owned by any one culture or belief system. You can connect anything if you try hard enough, and make it mean anything you want it to."
• Swizz Beatz told MTV News:"That song was the last one of the album. I [originally] fell back off The Blueprint 3 because there were rumors about Timbaland working on the whole thing, rumors about Kanye working on the whole thing. I respected that. If they want to do that, I respected that. I'm on to the next one. I gotta respect Jay's creativity. If he wanted to have Kanye produce that whole record, let them have that. I know the next album we can hook up or whatever. [Me and Jay] got 11, 12 years in together - that's the homie. Since other people was on the album, I came in the loop at the last minute. [Jay] got on the phone like, 'I need one of them things.' I said, 'I'mma send you something. I don't have a whole bunch of joints I wanna send you. I got this one particular that I wanna send you.' I sent it to him. That was 'On to the Next One.' He said, 'That was crazy. It's "Drop It Like It's Hot" crazy.' I was super excited because I threw one dart and that dart hit the bull's-eye. That's amazing, being where I'm at in the industry where you can throw darts like that."