Madonna is clearly pretty sharp when it comes to music, invariably surrounding herself with cutting-edge producers and collaborators for each new album (before dumping them for people even more cutting-edge the next time). But it seems she’s also pretty savvy when it comes to mobile, or at least her management are.
See, Madge’s next album is out soon. It’s called ‘Hard Candy’. And to say it’s being promoted heavily to mobile users is an understatement. She started by signing a deal with Vodafone here in Europe.
It involves distributing seven tracks from ‘Hard Candy’ during the week leading up to its release on 28th April - one a day - for Vodafone customers to download. They also bagged an exclusive on her new single ‘4 Minutes’, and will have a dedicated Madonna mini-site on Vodafone Live.
But that was just the start…
Madonna has signed an entirely separate deal with Samsung that just covers France. It’ll see ‘Hard Candy’ and the video for ‘4 Minutes’ being preloaded on the Samsung F400 when it goes on sale in early June, while Samsung is also sponsoring her Paris gig on 6th May.
And finally, US mobile operator Verizon Wireless has signed another deal with Madonna, this time to release a mobile-exclusive remix of ‘4 Minutes’ by Timbaland - who himself has signed a deal to be Verizon’s ‘producer in residence’. It’s available as a full-track, a ringtone and a ringback tone on Verizon’s portal, as well as exclusive video footage of Timbaland twiddling studio knobs to make it.
What does all this mean? Well, it means that Madonna has mobile-savvy people around her, for sure. But it also shows how mobile is increasingly seen as an important promotional mechanism by the music industry. Whether consumers actually want to buy music on their phones remains an open question, of course.
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