The Queen of Dance Music

Madonna scored three awards at the 2013 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas last night, May 19th.

I couldn’t be happier for her - she truly deserved the recognition on those three categories: Top Touring Artist, Top Dance Artist and Top Dance Album with MDNA.

The MDNA Tour was the top grossing tour of 2012 (it also became the second highest grossing tour by a solo artist in history, behind another Madonna tour). As a dance music artist, all the singles off of her latest record went to the #1 position on the Billboard dance charts. The album itself (MDNA) became the best selling dance record of 2012.

In other words: no one else could have taken those awards home besides Madonna. It’s good to see the industry recognizing it, especially in this day and age, where awards are exchanged for favors (usually in the form of “live performances”).

Congrats to Madonna, and everybody who made the MDNA Tour the top tour of the year.

If you don’t get the joke, watch the following video:

Breaking News:

EPIX announced this morning that Madonna’s record-breaking MDNA Tour will be broadcast on June 22.

This is not the first time EPIX broadcasts a Madonna concert. Her previous tour, Sticky & Sweet, lauched the network - premiering on its first day on air, four years ago.

The MDNA Tour became the #1 tour of 2012, and was seen by over 2.2 million people around the world in 88 sold out shows.

I cannot wait to see the motherfucking show again!

MDNA Post Tour Blues

What happens when Madonna is not on tour?

On a serious note, Madonna has already done another project in collaboration with Giovanni Bianco, Arianne Phillips and Steven Klein in early February, besides her secret project with Klein filmed/photographed in Argentina in December 2012.

I say new video project + magazine spread. Any suggestions?

Charlie Hides, be careful, monsters will start sending death threats in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5…

The Year of MDNA

Can we say 2012 was the year of MDNA?

The MDNA Tour has already been announced by Billboard Boxscore as the top grossing tour of the year.

Pollstar just revealed their numbers - and guess who’s being certified the top grossing tour of 2012 again?

Remember when Elton John said her career was over and that her tour has been a disaster?

The good news is: rumor has it that the Queen of Pop is extending her MDNA Tour into 2013. 

She closed the tour in Argentina with a tattoo that said END on the top of her back, LESS at the bottom. And now we know that her crew members have been hired for a 2013 tour as well.

Some girls can do anything…

Words cannot describe what you are about to see.

Drag Queen Janina performing the entire (well, almost) MDNA concert at Tunga XXL in Italy.

There are costume changes, backdrop videos and everything!

Even the Like a Virgin and the corset performance!

5 stars for the effort. 

Some girls can do anything…

Speaking of that, I heard that the video Madonna filmed in Argentina was NOT for Gang Bang or Love Spent.

They were actually filming the video for SOME GIRLS (one of my favorites).

I love it already. Much better than the last rumored track, Beautiful Killer.

Rolling Stone Magazine: Flop This Way Ball

Who knew the Brazilian press was so cool? They are not hiding the fact that Lady Gaga’s tour is failing miserably in Latin America.

Even Rolling Stone Brazil is talking about it. Read the article here. But if you don’t read Portuguese, do not worry. Here’s what every single paragraph in the article says:

Headline:

Lady Gaga in Brazil: Slow ticket sales become an Internet joke.

Three days before her tour in Brazil, her tickets won’t sell, almost half of them still available.

“[The Born This Way Ball] was announced as one of the biggest musical productions of 2012 in Brazil, but being placed side by side with Madonna, Lady Gaga might end up as one of the biggest fiasco among recent international concerts in the country. Three days before her first concert in Rio de Janeiro (Friday, November 9), Gaga’s slow ticket sales have become a joke on the Internet and her promoters are doing unusual deals to sell them. 

Department store Riachuelo, for instance, co-sponsor of the concert along with T4T, is selling tickets on a “buy one, get one free” basis. OBS: they have this deal daily announced in newspapers. Deal-of-the-day websites, such as Peixe Urbano and Groupon offer her tickets for half their face-value.

Such desperate measure to increase the number of people in the audience for her three concerts in the country - Rio de Janeiro (at Parque dos Atletas, Nov. 9), Sao Paulo (at Morumbi Stadium, Nov. 11), and Porto Alegre (at FIERGS parking lot, Nov. 13) - have become a widespread joke on the internet.

Starting last Monday, November 5, Tumblr page Achei Ingresso da Gaga jokes about how easy it is to get a ticket to one of her concerts. The jokes go along the lines “I bought a book at an “old books” bookstore and I won a ticket for her show” or “I bought a scratch-off lottery ticket and I won a ticket for Gaga’s concert”.

According to O Dia (a newspaper from Rio), Gaga’s numbers in Rio de Janeiro are even more worrying. The show will happen at “Cidade do Rock”, a huge venue with capacity to up to 100k people (as it could be seen at the Rock in Rio Festival in 2011). For her concert there, Gaga hasn’t sold 14,000 tickets out of the 86,000 available.

In São Paulo, where the demand was higher, Gaga hasn’t sold over half the total Morumbi Stadium capacity for a show this Sunday, Nov. 11. Only 33k tickets were sold out of the 67k available, according to UOL blog Popoload.

Rolling Stone Brasil contacted T4F, but they said they would not disclose the official number of ticket sales.

The pop singer brings her Born This Way Ball along with the fun and cheesy hardcore band The Darkness and DJ Starlight.

Do I need to point out that everything Rolling Stone magazine published in their article had been said on my blog before?

 
So bite me, little monsters! 

 
Oh! And by the way, here’s Madonna’s MDNA stage structure being built in Rio de Janeiro for Lady Gaga’s commercially failed concert:

She’s doing everything she can to avoid being bankrupt again, including shamelessly using Madonna’s MDNA stage structure after turning down singing with the Queen of Pop herself.

2012 Billboard Touring Awards Finalists

TOP TOUR: 

1) Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Wrecking Ball 
2) Madonna, MDNA 
3) Roger Waters, The Wall Live 

Where the hell is Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Ball?

TOP MANAGER:

1) Jon Landau Management (Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band) 
2) MFM/Mark Fenwick (Roger Waters) 
3) Guy Oseary (Madonna) 

Where the fuck is Lady Gaga’s Troy Carter?

CONCERT MARKETING & PROMOTION AWARD:

1) Demi Lovato/Hallmark 
2) Lady Antebellum/Lipton 
3) Linkin Park/Honda Civic 
4) Madonna/Smirnoff 
5) Tim McGraw/Pennzoil 
6) Zac Brown Band/Jack Daniel’s

 
Where’s Lady Gaga and - who the fuck is marketing her tour anyway? Charmin Ultra Soft?  

That’s what happens when your tour is NOT among the top 3 tours of the year.

 
Read more on Billboard.biz.

Madonna piece on Conan - at Yankee Stadium

Remember when Billy (from Conan O’Brien’s show) went to Tel Aviv to film a well publicized and highly disappointing short and Madonna-free report on the opening night of the MDNA Tour?

Well, I guess they decided to make up for that.

For our surprise (no one knew they were allowed in Madonna’s sound-check in NYC), they recently aired another MDNA piece - this time including Madonna in the footage. It’s a short video, but very funny (it starts at minute 6:46).

I love it how you can see Madonna’s daughter Mercy James around her mom while she is rehearsing. So cute. Rocco, as usual, so adorable as well. 

The Miseducation of Little Monsters

It’s common knowledge that Lady Gaga fans are arguably (paraphrasing the singer herself) the most “idiotic, moronic and retarded” fan-base of all popstars in this day and age. Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, none of them have such an uneducated group of followers. 

I get a lot of tweets from these uneducated Lady Gaga fans, and while Twitter is a great way of communicating, it is not the best tool to explain and teach them anything - no one that stupid can learn anything in less than 140 characters.

And maybe that’s the problem with Lady Gaga’s fan-base: they are so stupid, they think the world is explained in 140 characters. They live and build their so-called knowledge on headlines and catchphrases, not on factual information.

So this is an illustrated commentary on how little monsters are misinformed, illogical, and just plain stupid, as well as an analysis on their rhetoric and corrections on the comparisons they draw between Lady Gaga (universally known as Madonna-wannabe) and the Queen of Pop herself, Madonna.

Here’s an example of a rather lengthy exchange I had with a little monster on Twitter the other day:

First, this little monster told me to compare Madonna’s first three tours to Gaga’s based on how much money those tours made - even though the Madonna’s tours he asked me to compare happened three decades ago.

At the same time, he showed me how misinformed he was regarding Mariah Carey and Billboard - but I’ll get to that later:

My response?

How can anyone compare tours from the late 2000s and early 2010s with tours from the 1980s?

Suggesting a comparison around MONEY-MAKING over a period of time that spans three decades is the most efficient way of telling the world how ignorant you are.

This little monster AKA @berns_pdf clearly has no idea of what INFLATION means. Obviously, he does not understand the notions of CURRENCY RATE and how volatile currency is. Let me reinforce this unknown notion for him:

$5 today (in 2012) does not have the same value as $5 in 1985. In fact, let me point out that the Federal Minimum Wage in 1985 was $3.35. In 2012, it is 7.25. Meaning, today, the minimum wage is 54% more than in 1985 - that’s more than half.

So this little monster (@berns_pdf) wanted to compare the amount of money Madonna made in 1985, 1987 and 1990 (as he informed me the amounts in his tweets) to Gaga’s tours that happened in 2008/2009/2011. How dumb can he be? The funniest thing is: he had asked me to have an intellectual conversation. It’s rather ironic coming from a person whose intellect ignores the notions of currency volatility, rate and inflation. 

But that was not it. You would think he would understand how wrong he was and let it be. But no, he was determined to “win” the conversation. So he tried to convince me that he was talking about “momentum and rate”, by talking about “sales and attendance”:

Well, @berns_pdf is clearly too dumb to understand that the “sales” issue had already been solved, and his comparison was not valid because the amount raised by the sales of tickets three decades ago is not the same as in the late 2000s. So I decided to focus on the other issue: attendance.

So I used Madonna’s second tour (The Who’s That Girl Tour) and compared it to Lady Gaga’s second tour (The Monster Ball). Logically, Madonna’s average attendance was 5X more than Lady Gaga’s: 

Madonna’s Who’s That Girl Tour  /  Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball

Audience:  1,386,594 people  /  1,454,824 people

Number of shows:  39  /  201

Average attendance:  35,554 per show  /  7,237 per show

So both parameters @berns_pdf used to try to convince me Gaga’s success is equal to Madonna’s were invalid:

The money made by the sales of tickets of Madonna’s tours in the 80s cannot be compared to Gaga’s tours without inflationary adjustments. While the attendance, well, Madonna’s attendance was 5X higher.

Note that attendance does not require inflationary adjustments:

100 people in 2012 equal 100 people in the 80s. One person in 2012 equals one person in 1985. The value of the unit of people, of physical bodies present at a venue does not fluctuate. And, unlike what @berns_pdf expected, Madonna’s attendance was a lot bigger than Gaga’s per show.

In other words, @berns_pdf is just plain stupid (feel free to send him this post on twitter).

He also failed to understand another thing. He said: “I don’t see how comparing tours is any different from the comparing of album sales and single sales that you were doing, so…”

First of all, let’s  clarify one thing: @berns_pdf himself tweeted me the amount of money Madonna’s three first tours made and asked me to compare them to Gaga’s - he asked for the comparisons.

Secondly: not all parameters are invalid. The one @berns_pdf wanted to compare was invalid because money-making three decades ago was different than three years ago. But there are other parameters that do not require adjustments because their numbers are real, objective and do not fluctuate with inflation, like attendance and the number of shows. 

But the most astonishing of it all, is that he mentioned the sales and singles comparions I made (probably on this post here) without understanding it. 

On this post, I actually state that the inclusion of digital artists on Wikipedia’s best selling artists’s list is wrong if it’s done without inflationary adjustments - and that is exactly the same I say about money-making with a tour in the 80s in comparison with a current tour. How dumb can @berns_pdf be? 

What I say in that post is that the number of albums and singles sold in the past (before the MP3, iTunes and the digital music era) need to be adjusted if they are put in comparison with people from the digital era, where downloading ten songs from the same album individually on iTunes might count as ten albums sold. 

Talk about being a complete moron.

I love it how he dug himself an even deeper hole when he suggested I didn’t know what rate and momentum meant. Well, we had already discussed the two topics he mentioned (“sales and attendance”) and Madonna was above Gaga on both, so what is this fixation with “rate and momentum”?

But before I talk about that, let me quickly point out how after failing in recognizing how Madonna’s attendance in her second tour was in average 5X bigger than Gaga’s, he told me to compare Gaga’s first tour with Madonna’s first tour. But there’s a problem: there is no official number for Gaga’s first tour (The Fame Ball). There is an imaginary list that includes her appearances at several summer festivals in Europe as part of her tour - even though those people were not there for a Gaga concert, but for a music festival with several other headlining acts. 

So, what’s up with rate and momentum?

1983-1987: in the first four years of her career, Madonna’s album sales were increasing. Her second album sold more than the first. Her third album sold more than the second. By the time Madonna started her second tour, she ditched her old look and everything that made her an icon in the previous years and came out completely different. The highlights of Madonna’s Who’s That Girl Tour was her new material, songs from True Blue and the soundtrack of Who’s That Girl?

2008-2012: in the first four years of her career, Lady Gaga’s album sales are decreasing. Her second album was released as an EP, but virtually, it sold the same amount as The Fame. Her third album, Born This Way, sold less than The Fame Monster or The Fame individually (and obviously, combined). On her second tour, Gaga is already relying on her past looks (meat dress, origami dress, etc.) and the highlights of her show are songs from her previous albums, not the ones from Born This Way. And she’s been around for four years only.

Rate and momentum? Madonna was on the rise in the first four years of her career. Lady Gaga’s in decline right now.

@berns_pdf is so moronic and confused that he said I compared Lady Gaga’s first tour (Fame Ball) to Madonna’s current tour. He even called me “retarded fuck” and told me to “read my tweets again”.

Can you guys show me what part of my tweets compares Gaga’s first tour with Madonna’s current tour?

What a fucking moron this @berns_pdf is. Please, tweet him your thoughts on him.

Without any factually based argument, @berns_pdf started changing subject. As he failed to proof how Gaga’s “rate and momentum” is as equally successful as Madonna in the same moment of her career, he started talking about issues I never denied, such as “Born This Way Reductive” selling more than “MDNA” on its opening week. Arguing about something no one was arguing about. Is that a smart or intellectual thing to do? No. Especially when you are as moronic as @berns_pdf.

First of all: Madonna’s MDNA album was not sold for 0,99 cents, Born This Way was. Secondly: The Super Bowl was NOT promotion for MDNA. @berns_pdf also does not know what a promotion is.

When artists promote their album/singles, they are trying to reach people that do not follow them, trying to reach people that are not their fans. The fans already know about their future releases because they follow them. A promotion is about expanding their followers:

When Gaga goes on Ellen, or Jay Leno, or Letterman, or Oprah and talks about her new album/single, she is promoting a product very specifically. The introduction on these shows are usually “here to perform her brand new single”, or something similar. The TV hosts usually hold the CD in their hands and show it to the camera. At the end, the people watching those shows will know Gaga has a new song, or album, and if they like it, they might buy it. None of this happened to MDNA during the Super Bowl.
 
Take a look at what’s in Ellen’s hands and the image behind her:

If you were not a Madonna fan but watched and enjoyed her Super Bowl performance, you still did not know she had a new album coming out in the next couple of months. Madonna was not introduced as “here to performe some classics and a brand new song” or anything like that. In other words:

MDNA was not promoted during the Super Bowl in any moment.

There was no advertisement, no mentioning that Madonna was releasing an album at all. How is that a promotion? The people watching the event did not find out during the Super Bowl that Madonna had an album about to come out. 

See the difference?

Other than that, I have no problem with Lady Gaga, who is a star of this generation, selling more records than Madonna today. That’s why I don’t have a problem with Born This Way selling more than MDNA. The bottom-line is: Lady Gaga has to do a lot of promotion to sell the amount of albums she sells. “Born This Way” is virtually the most promoted album in history. MDNA barely received any promotion and is, as of now, the 5th best selling album of 2012.

The victory and success of MDNA is not in the comparisons with other people, but in the fact that after 29 years in the music business, Madonna still manages to release an album that ends up among the best selling albums of the year. I can assure you that by the rate Gaga is going now, she won’t be among the best selling acts in 25 years. It’s logic.

I am much more interested in comparing another newer act, Adele, whose latest album “21”, received less than 1/3 of the promo Born This Way received and sold more than 4X what Gaga did with a very timid promotion in the same period of time.

Oh, and one more thing:

Remember his tweet that mentioned Mariah Carey’s “Billboard dominance”?

A simple research on Billboard will show you one thing:

Madonna is the one who dominates the Billboard charts, NOT Mariah.

According to Billboard itself:

Madonna is the second most successful musical act on the Billboard charts of all times, not Mariah. Mariah isn’t the #1 either. The #1 is the Beatles.

And that makes Madonna the most successful solo act and the most successful female on Billboard - NOT Mariah.

Mariah Carey comes at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists list.

Mimi’s Dominance? At #6? While Madonna is #2?

Check for yourself on Billboard here.

That’s the logic behind @berns_pdf.

Feel free to tweet him this post.

Lady Gaga is Full of Shit

We all know Lady Garbage is full of shit. Besides blatantly copying other people’s songs, lying about receiving approval and blessing from the people she rips off, besides lying about “inventing” the bubble dress and the fiber-optic wig, Lady Garbage  never stops amazing me on how full of crap she can be.

Remember that earlier this year she told Oprah that she would not be giving interviews anymore?

She told Oprah: 

“Other than this interview, I do not intend to speak to anyone for a long time. I dont need a damn thing, no press, no television…”

Yeah, right…

Well, that was in March 2012. We are in September. It’s been six months. Six months!

Guess who will be on Good Morning America next week?

Good luck with the ratings… you know, because Lady “I-don’t-need-any-press” Garbage do not have the ability to attract viewers. Who can ignore the fact that her holiday special sunk? In fact, the 38-year-old A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (re-run every year for 38 years) beat her in the ratings. 

The very same “last interview in a long time” with Oprah Winfrey was a disaster! It only drew 808,000 viewers. To give you an idea of how much of a failure it was, Oprah’s interview with Bobbi Kristina scored 3,5 million viewers also in March 2012 (source here).

Maybe GMA is counting on having Oprah, outside her new home (OWN) and as a central piece of the show will bring in the ratings… 

In the meantime, little monsters will have to live with the fact that Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show was more watched than the game itself, and became the most watched televised event in history (source here). 

Madonna: Live at Paris Olympia

You can say whatever you want about Madonna, but she has become the biggest Pop Culture icon in history. And that has a lot to do with her detractors (one doesn’t become such an important cultural icon with a bunch of yes-men around).

Last night, during her “intimate” and “exclusive” “one night only” performance at the Olympia, in Paris, whatever her detractors were looking to accomplish, they ended up demonstrating how relevant Madonna is as a cultural icon. 

The reassurance of Madonna’s status as the most important pop icon in the world started even before she stepped on stage last night in Paris. 

On the YouTube page her show was broadcast last night, thousands of people clicked on the “dislike” button even before the show began. Yeah, that’s right. Even before Madonna went on stage, thousands of anti-Madonna people took the time to log on to YouTube (increasing the number of people viewing the event) to simply to “dislike” a show that hadn’t even started. And that is the greatest proof of her relevance:

At this day and age, people are so preoccupied with Madonna, that they feel the need to express their distaste/dislike for whatever she is doing, even BEFORE she does anything.

That’s how powerful that woman, as a CULTURAL ICON, is: thousands of people disliked her show on YouTube before it even started, thousands of people took a few minutes of their day to pre-judge something they had no idea what was about. The only thing those people were aware of was their preconceived notion about Madonna - and that is what a true ICON is all about. But that’s not all.

Last night’s event reinforced Madonna’s status as the biggest cultural icon not just because of the thousands of pre-concert disapproving viewers on YouTube. What happened inside the venue is what truly shows how powerful and relevant Madonna is:

A number of concert attendees booed Madonna after they realized the performance was over, and that she wouldn’t be coming back on stage after those nine songs. They booed, they threw bottles at the stage and at the event’s crew (at that time, they were already taking down her light and sound equipment).

The media, as usual, is loving it. Headlines go from “Madonna gets booed-off stage in Paris” to ”Madonna starts riots”. The funniest part of it all is that, however the press twists last night’s events, they fail to mention that by the time the crowd started booing Madonna, she was already halfway through her hotel in Paris. 

The truth of the matter is that there was indeed a group of people attending the show looking for trouble. Whether the show was 50-minute long, or she sang two songs (or nine, or 20), they were there to do something “insulting”:

As many photographers captured with their cameras, a group of people in the audience held signs that called Madonna “SALOPE” (“slut” in French), or said things like “Addicted to our $$$” or “Madonna Moi Non Plus” DURING Madonna’s performance. 

That is NOT a spontaneous reaction - that is a premeditated, well-planned behavior. So was the booing at the end of her show.

But of course, you don’t see the mainstream media talking about that. They just want you to think that Madonna did something to piss all her die-hard fans in Paris that night without mentioning all the facts.  

But at the end, it doesn’t really matter who those people were, and what they wanted. Were they little monsters? Were they Marine Le Pen’s partisans? Who cares?

All that matters is that they made Madonna’s status as a CULTURAL FORCE even bigger. 

You see,  protests happen around/about icons that share a meaningful relation with the issue being dealt with. For instance, protests regarding the Economy happen in front of economic icons (such as Wall Street); Gay Marriage protests happen in front of iconic places where decisions regarding the issue are made: in front of a Church, or Capitol Hill, for example. 

Now, Madonna’s concert is the place where people go to protest against whatever she stands for, whether politically, socially or as a cultural icon. 

Extreme Right French people did not like Madonna’s opinion on Xenophobic Marine Le Pen? Lady Gaga fans don’t like the fact that Madonna is (and will always be) the biggest popstar in the world? It doesn’t matter who they were, all we know is that they made a very public statement during Madonna’s concert (in the venue and on YouTube).

At the end of the day, those people simply made a Madonna concert the place to protest whatever position they were discontent with, making Madonna a bigger cultural icon than before.

So yeah! Thank you Madonna detractors for reinforcing her status as the biggest Pop Culture icon of all time.