Alicia Keys Is Out As BlackBerry's Creative Director After One Year

Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys will leave her role as BlackBerry's creative director on Jan. 30, exactly one year after she joined, the company announced.

We first saw the news on CTV.

Alicia Keys joined BlackBerry the day the company debuted its new BlackBerry 10 operating system. But BB10 and the devices it ran on turned out to be a dud. Since then, BlackBerry failed at an attempt to go private. Its CEO Thorsten Heins stepped down. Now the company is focusing more on its enterprise business and selling phones in emerging markets like Indonesia.

Keys was effectively a celebrity spokesperson for the brand more than she was a regular 9-to-5 employee. In fact, she was busted tweeting from an iPhone shortly after she took on her gig at BlackBerry. (She claimed her account was hacked though.)