It's been a tough chart week for Madonna. First, it looks like Neil Diamond's new full-length is going to knock Hard Candy out of the top spot on the U.S. album chart. Then Scooter shoots past her new album on the British charts. Scooter? The German techno band that seemed to be on every lousy compilation for awhile? Yep.
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Madonna, despite what Idolator's resident Madge-hater might have you believe, has always been an innovator. First female star of MTV, biggest musical act to make soft-core porn of themselves commercially available, etc., etc. And her upcoming Sticky and Sweet tour will be notable for more than just bisexual kissing—her Live Nation overlords are prepared to revolutionize the way that you'll overpay for tickets to an inevitably disappointing show!
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Madonna has announced the first string of dates for her world tour, which kicks off in late August in Wales and makes its way to a bunch of baseball stadiums (Dodger Stadium!) and enormodomes arenas in the U.S. beginning in October. The tour—which is (sigh) called the Sticky and Sweet Tour—is Madonna's first under her 10-year, multimillion-dollar deal with Live Nation. Did you know that her last three tours have grossed a combined $400 million? Ticket prices are going to be between $55 and $300, which should help on that particular "keeping up with past glories" front. Dates after the jump.
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Madonna's Hard Candy was last week's top-selling album, shifting 280,000 copies in its first week of release and leaving every other commercially available offering in the dust. Candy was the only album on this week's chart to break the six-figures-sold mark; Mariah Carey's E=MC2, the runner-up to Hard Candy, sold 95,000 copies.
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I wonder if there's someone out there (maybe even in the Idolator audience!) who actually took the time—not to mention the risk of massive eyestrain—to watch last night's Madonna concert simulcast on their cell phone, even though "streaming live video is incredibly bandwidth-intensive for mobile operators... [and] of questionable value to subscribers, given the small screens of most mobiles." So wait, you mean to tell me that if you shrink the above picture down to a 125-pixel width and look at it while listening to Madonna songs through a pile of static you won't feel like you're there? Next thing you're gonna say, Hollywood Reporter, is that ringback tones aren't popular! [Hollywood Reporter]
From time to time, we like to round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. Under consideration today is the new album/contract killer by Madonna, Hard Candy, which hits stores tomorrow:
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Operation Shutdown
It would seem that the leak of Madonna's Hard Candy has succeeded in taking out most of the pop music leak blogs that linked to its Rapidshare-enabled downloads earlier today, i.e., most of the pop music leak blogs that weren't demolished by the great Mariah Carey blog purge of early 2008. For now, anyway—who knows where else this game of whack-a-mole can lead us? [Where Is Chris Pix?!?]
Question
This month's two big record releases—Madonna's Hard Candy and Mariah Carey's E=MC2—were kept under super-secret lock and key by their record labels, but that didn't stop them from leaking approximately 10 days before they were scheduled to hit shelves, with both leaks being marked as the "retail" editions of the album. Somehow in my life I've never worked in a record store, so I'm wondering exactly why these retail editions have always seemed to show up at the same time on even the most protected albums. (Recall that even the Raconteurs record leaked, despite its much shorter lead time.) Wouldn't it make more sense to get the albums on store shelves as soon as the shipments arrive? Why is the music industry still so attached to the Tuesday release date, anyway? I realize that even in these hard times it's a large, lumbering beast, but you'd think that protecting a revenue stream would at least spur some sort of action. [Photo via Spojen?]
ARTIST: Madonna
TITLE: Hard Candy (well, 58% of it, anyway)
RELEASE DATE: April 29, 2008
WEB DEBUT: April 20, 2008
Madonna, Justin Timberlake and "Verizon Mobile Producer In Residence" Timbaland have teamed up to make a remix of "4 Minutes" by... Madonna, Justin Timberlake and Timbaland. Evidently the trio went into Verizon Wireless' mobile recording studio after the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony and created this "Underground Remix" of their Top 10 hit for the mobile-phone company. If you take the effort to buy this remix, you'll also get footage of the trio holding hands and dancing around a mic while chanting "Can you hear me now?"
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Ed. note: Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on this week's Billboard charts:
So momentous was the news of Mariah Carey's triumph on the Hot 100 with "Touch My Body" that Billboard leaked it on Wednesday, a day early. Chart freaks talk about acts beating small records all the time. But it's not every day that someone beats a mark on the all-time list that involves something as iconic as career No. 1 hits. And it's even rarer when that record is four decades old and involves the King of Rock & Roll.
And hey, Elvis was only ranked second on the list for total No. 1 hits. (He was, until this week, first place among solo acts.) Even sadder for Presley fans, this same week, another lady bests a record he had all to himself—this time, for most Top 10 hits. As "4 Minutes" makes a 65-point leap to No. 3, Madonna pulls out of a tie with the King, leaving him all shook up with 17 No. 1's and 36 Top 10s, to Carey's 18 chart-toppers and Madge's 37 smashes.
There's no joy in Graceland today. And if you're near Abbey Road right now, don't be surprised if folks there look a bit twitchy, too.
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Things That Keeping Fuse On In The Background Taught Me
Not only is Madonna's new single reminiscent of the theme to The Price Is Right, its chorus is also pretty much a carbon copy of the sung hook for Flo Rida's "Elevator." And both songs feature Timbaland, who clearly is getting all of his ideas from hanging out in clubs that are playing nothing but his songs. I just sang the chorus to Madge's song while the video was playing in the background, and it was a perfect match. I encourage you to do the same. (Click the cover for an embed of the "Elevator" clip.)
Madonna's video for "Four Minutes"—featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, and bearing a title that's been chopped down from "Four Minutes To Save The World," presumably for national-security reasons—debuted on the Internet this morning, and its extended JT-and-Madge mating dance not only squicked me out at a way-too-early hour, it had even more indications that Hard Candy will be Madonna's "I'm out of ideas because the whole idea of 'subculture' has bubbled away in the social-networking era" album. The video, and five conclusions to take away from it, after the jump.
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