all about Madonna

Part 1: Random Moments

Part 2: Jumping Rope

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD3z84Ip6IM

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Thanks to Roger D

If anyone had any doubt that touring is where the money is in the music business, a quick look at the top Moneymakers for 2008 should hammer the point home.

Regardless of genre, retail sales or radio play, each of the 20 acts on Billboard’s Moneymakers list toured in 2008. (Taylor Swift mostly opened for Brad Paisley but doesn’t get credit for that revenue). For almost all of them, touring generated the most revenue. And in a year when recorded-music sales declined yet again, many earned more at the box office than ever before.

1. Madonna: $242,176,466
2. Bon Jovi: $157,177,766
3. Bruce Springsteen: $156,327,964
4. The Police: $109,976,894
5. Celine Dion: $99,171,237
6. Kenny Chesney: $90,823,990
7. Neil Diamond: $82,174,000
8. Rascall Flatts: $63,522,160
9. Jonas Brothers: $62,638,814
10. Coldplay: $62,175,555
11. The Eagles: $61,132,213
12. Lil Wayne: $57,441,334
13. AC/DC: $56,505,296
14. Michael Buble: $50,257,364
15. Miley Cyrus: $48,920,806
16. Taylor Swift: $45,588,730
17. Journey: $44,787,328
18. Billy Joel: $44,581,010
19. Mary J. Blige: $43,472,850
20. Kanye West: $42,552,402

The top five Moneymakers are also the five acts that earned the most on tour, and in the same order, according to Billboard Boxscore. Eight of the top 10 Moneymakers are in the Boxscore top 10.

Even more remarkably, the top Moneymaker – Madonna – only had the 50th-best-selling album in the country. She ranked 14th on the list of digital track sellers and didn’t place on the ringmasters chart. Her place on Moneymakers, like her $242,176,466 income, comes from the highest-earning tour that took place in 2008.

In fact, those questioning whether Madonna rates a reported 10-year, $120 million 360 deal with Live Nation might reconsider. Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet tour took in $229,886,340 at the box office, although the extravagant production might have cost up to 40% of that gross, according to industry estimates. The margin is much better on tour merchandise, where Madonna probably raked in more than $18 million in sales, not counting her licensing business.

Of course, nothing helps reduce tour production costs like more touring. So Madonna will perform another run of concerts this summer – 25 shows in the United Kingdom and Europe – which will add to the take of the top-grossing tour by a female or solo artist.

Outside of the United Kingdom, all of Madonna’s concerts will be in stadiums, so she’ll gross several million dollars per night. By fall, Sticky & Sweet will have run for 80 shows and earn a place in the top five grossing tours of all time.

This is the first time Madonna has ever extended a tour. “It absolutely hasn’t happened in the four tours I’ve been involved with,” says Madonna’s tour producer Arthur Fogel, chairman of global music for Live Nation.

“There’s been talk [of extending] during each one, but it has never come to be. But with this one, she loves the show, she’s had a great time and she’s excited about playing new markets.”

source : billboard

Madonna, Paul Oakenfold Estadio do Morumbi – Sao Paulo, Brazil – Dec. 18, 20-21, 2008
$15,462,185
196,656 / 196,656
3 / 3
$252.10, $67.23
Live Nation Global Touring/T4F-Time For Fun

Madonna, Paul Oakenfold Estadio do Maracana – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Dec. 14-15, 2008
$7,322,269
107,000 / 107,000
2 / 2
$252.10, $75.63
Live Nation Global Touring/T4F-Time For Fun

From Rafael (madonnaonline.com.br) :

We received news about the Sticky & Sweet DVD. It will be released in March by
Universal Music. This is the first product by Live Nation.

Madonna, Paul Oakenfold Estadio River Plate – Buenos Aires, Argentina – Dec. 4-5, 7-8, 2008
$18,274,292
263,693 / 263,693
4 / 4
$181.36, $27.35
Live Nation Global Touring/Time For Fun

Madonna Estadio Nacional – Santiago, Chile – Dec. 10-11, 2008
$11,385,499
146,242 / 146,242
2 / 2
$314.87, $35.33
Live Nation Global Touring/Time For Fun

Madonna, Paul Oakenfold Foro Sol – Mexico City, Mexico – Nov. 29-30, 2008
$10,428,743
104,270 / 104,270
2 / 2
$296.44, $20.85

Madonna’s “Sticky & Sweet” concert tour was the biggest-grossing music tour of 2008 in North America, raking in $105.3 million, concert tracking magazine Pollstar said on Monday.

The Material Girl, whose 58-show world tour finished in Brazil last week, was closely followed by another solo diva — Canadian-born Celine Dion, who made $94 million in North America from her first tour since ending an almost five-year residency in Las Vegas a year ago.

Rock veterans The Eagles were third on Pollstar’s list, grossing $73.4 million for their tour to support possibly their last studio album “Long Road out of Eden”.

Country music star Kenny Chesney ($72.2 million) and rock band Bon Jovi ($70.4 million) came in fourth and fifth.

The Top 10 grossing tours of North America were rounded out by Bruce Springsteen and the E street band ($69.3 million), Neil Diamond ($59.8 million), Rascal Flatts ($55.8 million), The Police ($48.0 million) and veteran rocker Tina Turner ($47.7 million).

Pollstar’s Top 10 list did not include global tour earnings for the year.

source : reuters

Case Study: Jason Harvey
Occupation: Video Engineer for Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet tour
Gear: Mac Pro, plus redundant backups. 17 high-definition video screens. Numerous MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Most-used apps include PRG Mbox EXtreme Media Server and Adobe’s Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop.

Madonna’s been working her particular brand of stardom for the last 26 years. And she is nothing if not an icon. Whether you love her music or could easily live without it, there’s no denying that Madonna has been one of the most provocative pop musicians of her time. And while her dance-floor-friendly confections are no small part of the Madonna mystique, her willingness to push the envelope visually and artistically is what sets her apart from her contemporaries.

Her latest live tour, the aptly named Sticky & Sweet, features a cavalcade of dancers, musicians, and even a snow-white Auburn Boattail Speedster, in addition to 17 high-definition video displays—the largest of which is 20 feet by 20 feet. And throughout the nearly 2-hour show, each of those 17 screens is filled with custom video—prerecorded, as well as live clips—thanks to a bunch of Apple tech.

For video engineer Jason Harvey, the day of the show is a long one. In addition to the 6 to 8 hours of setup the previous day, Harvey arrives at the venue on show days around 9 a.m. and usually finishes up around 3 a.m. the next morning. Prior to the show, Harvey is setting up video playback systems and video cameras used during the performance. And the whole thing runs almost entirely on Macs. “My whole entire crew—apart from one guy—uses MacBook Pros. Every single element of the show, apart from two parts of it, is all run on Macs. The sound and lighting crews also use Mac Pros for the show.”

Harvey’s 10-person video crew (plus a camera operator borrowed from another department) is responsible for re-creating the stunning visuals to accompany Madonna’s 24-song set each night. The core of the system is a pair of Mac Pros—a main system and a backup—running PRG Mbox EXtreme Media Server. The crew’s workflow for this show has been entirely digital. “We’re 100 percent tapeless,” Harvey says. “All of the video has come to us as digitally, downloaded over the Internet, or on disc. It’s saved us loads of time over tape, and we have editing suites onsite if we need them.”

During the show, there are 17 separate video screens, many of which can be moved and reconfigured. The largest screens are a set of three massive 20-by-20-foot displays, which can be moved together to create a single seamless display 60 feet wide and 20 feet high. Additionally, there are moving displays onstage, which Madonna uses several times, including during her video duets with Pharrell Williams and Justin Timberlake—during “Beat Goes On” and “4 Minutes,” respectively. But perhaps the most engaging video element of the show is the “stealth screen,” a pair of concentric circular displays that descend from the ceiling of the venue and offer a variety of dramatic effects.

During “Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You,” a slow-burner from Madonna’s latest album Hard Candy, she emerges from within the stealth screen, singing from atop a grand piano as amazing high-speed footage of falling water surrounds her. “That footage was shot on a Phantom camera, which shoots 1,000 frames per second in HD. “We started with a flat piece of content, but we knew we wanted something that would be visually stunning when it was wrapped around,“ Harvey says.

Aside from the footage, the LED screen itself is a high-tech wonder, although its distinctive shape comes about in a rather low-tech manner. According to Harvey, the stealth screen is “not really meant to be circular. It’s a bunch of flat panels, and we had to do a bit of customization to make it go around, using cable ties and a couple small uprights.”

Between the elaborate graphics, video interludes, and live shots, Harvey says there are only a few minutes during the two-hour show when his crew isn’t pushing images. “There are 24 songs in the show, and maybe five minutes when there isn’t any video—basically when Madonna is talking to the audience.” And with all that uptime, Harvey’s crew has to be ready for anything. “We have redundant systems running the whole time. If anything goes down, you just jump from A to B and go from there. Our playback guy watches the playback, and if there’s a problem, he’s in charge of that.”

The visual fireworks are the result of months of preparation on the part of Harvey and his crew. Harvey was brought in three months before the tour began to start putting together the visual aspects of the show. “Video elements would be sent in from New York, Los Angeles, London—several places all over the world. It was a really big bonus for us to be able to download the pieces, or grab them from a hard drive. If you’ve got something on tape that’s 20 minutes, it takes 20 minutes to ingest it; from a hard drive, it takes five.”

But even with months of advance planning and the tight time schedule that Madonna’s highly choreographed show requires, there are still real-life time crunches, and Harvey relies on his arsenal of Macs to take care of those. “We were changing a digital download 25 minutes before opening night. It was pretty scary. It’s not something I like to do, but with an all-digital workflow, I can push the limits to the wire.”

source : maclife