Madonna: Sustaining

Success in a Fast-moving
Business

Although summer had barely begun, 2012 was proving to be an exceptionally busy
year for Madonna Louise Ciccone. On February 3, her movie WE, based upon the
love affair between King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, which she had written
and directed, went on general release. Two days later, Madonna provided half-time
entertainment at the NFL Super Bowl before 70,000 football fans and an estimated TV
audience of 118 million. On March 26, MDNA, Madonnas 12th studio album and her
rst since Hard Candy in 2008, was released. MDNA went straight to the top of the
Billboard album chartalthough it stayed there for just one week.1 On May 29 her
concert tour would open in Tel Aviv; a further 76 performances would follow through-
out the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Madonna would spend her 54th
birthday on August 16 between concerts in Oslo and Zurich. The US leg of the tour
would nish in Miami on November 20, to be followed by a continuation of the tour
in South America and Australia. In addition, Madonnas commercial activities would
include a major sponsorship deal with Smirnoff vodka, the launch of her Hard Candy
health clubs, and her Truth or Dare brand, which would include fragrances and shoes.
Madonnas career achievements are summarized in her Wikipedia entry:

Madonna has sold more than 300 million records worldwide and is recognized as
the worlds top-selling female recording artist of all time by the Guinness World
Records. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), she
is the best-selling female rock artist of the 20th century and the second top-selling
female artist in the United States, behind Barbra Streisand, with 64 million certied
albums. In 2008, Billboard magazine ranked Madonna at number two, behind only
The Beatles, on the Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists, making her the most suc-
cessful solo artist in the history of the Billboard chart. She was also inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the same year. Considered to be one of the 25 Most
Powerful Women of the Past Century by Time for being an inuential gure in con-
temporary music, Madonna is known for continuously reinventing both her music
and image, and for retaining a standard of autonomy within the recording industry.2

Her success was also apparent in nancial terms. Forbes magazine estimated her
annual earnings as $58 million in 2010, $110 million in 2009, $40 million in 2008,
and $72 million in 2007.3 Over the past two decades the only female entertainer to
come close to her in terms of income has been Oprah Winfrey.

This case was prepared by Robert M. Grant. 2012 Robert M. Grant.

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 Beginnings

In July 1977, shortly before her nineteenth birthday, Madonna Louise Ciccone
arrived in New York City with $35 in her pocket. She had left Ann Arbor, where she
was majoring in dance at the University of Michigan. The third of eight children,
she was raised in the suburbs of Detroit. Her mother had died when she was six
years old. Her prospects in the world of show business looked poor. Apart from her
training in dance, she had little musical background and no contacts.
Life in New York was a struggle. I worked at Dunkin Donuts, I worked at
Burger King, I worked at Amys. I had a lot of jobs that lasted one day. I always
talked back to people and theyd re me. I was a coat-check girl at the Russian Tea
Room. I worked at a health club once a week.4 While pursuing a series of dance
engagements, she turned increasingly to music: the band Breakfast Club featured
Madonna together with three male friends. Subsequently, she and a former Michigan
boyfriend, Steve Bray, began working together on writing and performing songs in
the dance music genre that was sweeping New York clubs at the beginning of the
1980s. Madonna also worked on her imagea form of glam-grunge that featured
multilayered, multicolored combinations of thrift-store clothing together with scarves
and junk jewelry. Her trademark look of messy, badly dyed hair, neon rubber brace-
lets, black lace bras, white lace gloves, and chunky belt buckles would soon be
copied by teenage girls throughout the world.
Madonna was quick to recognize the commercial implications of the new musical
wave. The dance clubs were crucial and the DJs were the gatekeepers. Armed with
her demo tapes, Madonna and her friends frequented the hottest dance clubs where
they would make a splash with their amboyant clothing and provocative dancing.
At Danceteria, one of the staff referred to her as a heat-seeking missile targeting
the hottest DJs. DJ Mark Kamins introduced her to Mike Rosenblatt and Seymour
Stein of Sire Records, a division of Warner Records. Her rst 12-inch-single releases
with Warner achieved local success, encouraged by New Yorks leading DJ, John
Jellybean Benitez, who Madonna began dating in November 1982.
In July 1983, shortly before the release of her rst album, she ew to Los Angeles
to visit Freddie DeMann, manager of megastar Michael Jackson. DeMann remem-
bers the meeting vividly: I was knocked off my feet. Ive never met a more physical
human being in my life. DeMann agreed to become Madonnas manager.
By 1984, Madonna had become the hottest newcomer to US popular music. She
made little secret of her ambition. At her national TV debut on American Bandstand,
presenter Dick Clark asked her, What do you really want to do when you grow up?
Rule the world, she replied. While working on her second album, Like a Virgin,
Madonna also entered the movie business, rst, by playing a leading role in the
movie Desperately Seeking Susan and, second, by marrying bad-boy actor Sean Penn.

Madonna on Top

Madonnas struggle for fame revealed a drive, determination, and appetite for hard
work that would characterize her whole career. Im tough, Im ambitious, and I
know exactly what I wantand if that makes me a bitch, thats okay, she told the

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 MADONNA: SUSTAINING SUCCESS IN A FAST-MOVING BUSINESS

London News of the World newspaper. On the set of Desperately Seeking Susan she
maintained a blistering pace. During the shoot wed often get home at 11:00 or
12:00 at night and have to be back at 6:00 or 7:00 the next morning. Half the time
the driver would pick up Madonna at her health club. Shed get up at 4:30 in the
morning to work out rst.5
While Madonna relied on some of the best minds and strongest companies in
the entertainment business to manage and develop her career, there was little doubt
as to who was calling the shots. Her swift exit from her marriage with Sean Penn
further emphasized her unwillingness to allow messy personal relationships to com-
promise her career goals. For her third album, True Blue, released in June 1986,
Madonna insisted on being co-producer.
The documentary of her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour, Truth or Dare, clearly
revealed her hands-on management style. The tour established the pop concert
as multimedia show embracing music, dance, and theater. Madonna was involved
in every aspect of the shows design and planning, including auditioning dancers
and musicians, planning, costume design, and choosing themes. Madonna worked
closely with fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier, whose metallic, cone-breasted
costumes became one of the tours most vivid images. On the tour itself, the Truth
or Dare movie revealed Madonna as both creative director and chief operations
ofcer. In addition to her obsessive attention to every detail of the shows produc-
tion, she was the undisputed organizational leader responsible for building team
spirit among the diverse group of dancers, musicians, choreographers, and techni-
cians; motivating the troupe when times were tough; resolving disputes between
her fractious male dancers; and enforcing the highest standards of commitment
and effort.
The tour coincided with the summer 1990 release of Dick Tracy, the Disney
movie that was a vehicle for Madonna and her high-prole lover Warren Beatty.
Madonnas portrayal of Breathless Mahoney exuded her natural talents for style
and seductiveness and did much to rectify the scathing reviews of her previous
acting roles.

Sex, Religion, and Self-Promotion

In building her superstar image, Madonna began increasingly to court notoriety, and
push up against the boundaries of acceptability. Her overt sexuality together with
audacious, expletive-laced talk, and use of crucixes as items of jewelry raised dis-
quiet within conservative and religious circles. Madonnas explanation only added
fuel to the re: Crucixes are sexy because theres a naked man on them. Her
efforts to enthrall and shock culminated in the music videos that accompanied her
Like a Prayer album, released in 1989.
Piggybacking on Madonna-mania, PepsiCo paid Madonna $5 million for a com-
mercial based on the albums title track Like a Prayer. But the day after the rst
broadcast of the Pepsi commercial, Madonnas own Like a Prayer music video
appeared on MTV. The video was a stunning mixture of sex and religion that fea-
tured Madonna dancing in front of burning crosses, making love on an altar, and
revealing stigmata on her hands. Threatened by boycotts from Christian groups
and the American Family Association, PepsiCo pulled its Madonna commercial.

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 The explicit sexuality of Madonnas live and video performances resulted in her
achieving new heights of controversyand public awareness. The Blonde Ambition
concerts were threatened with cancellation by Toronto city authorities and con-
demned as blasphemous by the Vatican. The Justify My Love video released in
November 1990 set a new record for Madonna: it was banned by MTV for its por-
trayal of homosexuality, voyeurism, nudity, sado-masochism, and oral sex. Sex also
provided the basis for Madonnas entry into book publishing. Her photographic art
book Sex featured her in an array of sexual poses ... it sold half a million copies
in its rst week.

Creating and Projecting Image

Madonna has been compared to previous superstars and goddesses of sex and
glamorGreta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, Brigitte Bardotbut she has gone
further in creating a persona that transcends her work as an entertainer. Previous
superstars had been dened by their movie roles, while the big names in pop-
ular music, from Lena Horne to Janet Jackson, have been famous primarily for
their music. Madonna achieved a status that was no longer dened by her work.
By the 1990s, she was no longer famous as a pop singer or an actress: she was
famous for being Madonna. For the next decade she worked to reinforce this sta-
tus. Strategically, superstar status has much to commend it. Joining the pantheon of
superstars acts as insulation from comparison with lesser mortals. As her website
proclaimed: Madonna is icon, artist, provocateur, diva, and mogul.
In her acting roles the key was to take roles that were primarily vehicles for
Madonna to be Madonna. Her successes in Desperately Seeking Susan and Dick
Tracy were the result of roles where Madonna could be herself. However, both these
roles were to be eclipsed by Madonnas portrayal of Eva Pern in the movie ver-
sion of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita. While in previous roles Madonna
had been able to use her talents as a singer, a poser, a sharp talker, and a seduc-
tress, in Evita Madonna found a role that paralleled her own rags-to-riches story.
Like Madonna, Evita had working-class origins, a burning ambition, and had used
sex and shrewd judgment to become a legend in her time. The lm, released in
December 1996, was a huge commercial and critical success. As Q magazines Paul
Du Noyer remarked, If ever there was an ideal vehicle for Madonnas dream of
transcendent stardom, this must be it.6
The images through which Madonna projected herself to her audience were subject
to periodic, radical transformations. The street-kid look of the early 1980s was replaced
by the darker more intense sexuality of the late 1980s involving themes of sado-
masochism and bisexuality. During the early 1990s, she increasingly invoked the
imagery of past stars, most notably Marilyn Monroe. Like all successful fantasies,
these images were near awless in their comprehensiveness, integration, and atten-
tion to detail. They comprised a combination of dress, makeup, language, and social
behavior, and they were closely linked to Madonnas style of music at the time.
Probably the most radical of these image changes occurred in the late 1990s, fol-
lowing the birth of her rst child, Lourdes, on October 14 1996. Motherhood was
accompanied by a host of lifestyle and image changes for Madonna. She substituted
yoga for pumping iron; she began to study Kabbalah (a mystical interpretation of

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 MADONNA: SUSTAINING SUCCESS IN A FAST-MOVING BUSINESS 443

the Old Testament, she explained); she developed a close circle of women friends
and became less available to the media. Her interviews were amazingly devoid of
sex, expletives, and shock value. I think [motherhood] made me face up to my more
feminine side ... What I missed and longed for was that unconditional love that a
mother gives you. And so, having my daughter is the same kind of thing. Its like that
rst, true, pure, unconditional love.7
Lifestyle changes were reected in her music: Madonnas new album, Ray of
Light, incorporated a host of new inuences: electronic music, traditional Indian
music, Madonnas social and philosophical musings, and reections on her own
unhappy childhood. Her TV and video performances revealed a series of entirely
new looks. Yet despite her downplaying of aggressiveness and sexuality in favor of
a softer, more feminine image, the critical acclaim and commercial success of Ray
of Light pointed to Madonnas remarkable capacity to adapt to maturity and renew
her popularity.
Following the birth of her second child, Rocco, in August 2000, and subse-
quent marriage to British actor/director Guy Ritchie, Madonna became increas-
ingly involved in social and philanthropic activities. She was a major donor of
the Raising Malawi foundation, which provided support for orphaned children
in Malawi. Inevitably, these charitable activities became vehicles for publicity as
well as sources of controversy for Madonna. In October 2006, her adoption of a
13-month-old Malawian, David Banda, created a furor that involved developing-
world politicians, anti-globalization activists, religious leaders, and assorted intel-
lectuals. Madonna became immersed in a global debate over cash for babies
and one law for the rich; another for the poor. Her adoption of a second
Malawian child in 2009 was eventually permitted after being initially blocked by
the courts in Malawi.

Madonna as Mogul

Madonnas preoccupation with her art and her freedom of artistic expression
extended to an acute interest in her intellectual property rights. While her early hits
had been written by professional songwriters who pocketed royalties from their
copyrights, since 1986 Madonnas was always the rst name to appear on her song
credits and she co-produced most of her recordings.
Not only did Madonna maintain control over her own content, she increas-
ingly wanted a cut in distribution. In April 1992, she signed a $60 million deal
with Time Warner, Inc. This created Maverick Records, a music production com-
pany (together with TV, video, and music publishing wings) as a joint venture
between Madonna and Time Warner, with Warner Records providing distribution.
Although Madonna remained contracted to Warner Records for her own record-
ings, Maverick offered an avenue for her to develop and promote other singers
and musicians.
Madonna was quick to recognize the impact of digital technology and the inter-
net on the traditional business model of the pop music industry. In the pre-digital
world, live performances were primarily vehicles to publicize new album releases.
By 2000, le sharing and illegal downloading were killing the revenues of the record
companies. Seeing the emergence of concert tours as the dominant revenue stream,

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 Madonna returned to concert touring in 2001. The Drowned World tour was fol-
lowed by the Re-invention tour of 2004 and the Confessions tour of 2006.
When Maverick began losing money (along with most other record companies),
Madonna appreciated the need to reorganize her own commercial arrangements.
Her exit was credited by industry observers as strategic brilliance. Maverick sued
Warner Music for improper accounting. Afraid of bad publicity and long-running
litigation, Warner resolved the matter by buying out Madonnas share of Maverick
for $10 million in 2004.
Free of contractual commitments, Madonna was able to court a new business
partner. In 2007, she signed a $120 million, 10-year contract with Live Nation, the
worlds largest concert promotion company. The business paradigm has shifted,
she said upon signing. As a creative artist and a businesswoman I have to acknowl-
edge that. Most observers believed that Madonna had gained the better part of
the dealand with no music distribution capability, it seemed likely that Live
Nation would license Madonnas next album back to her old record company,
Warner. However, her Sticky and Sweet tour restored faith in Madonna as a money
machine. The tour set new standards in global scope, longevity, and revenue gen-
eration: the $408 million it generated made it the highest-grossing concert tour by
a solo artist. With 85 sell-out concerts between August 2008 and September 2009
spanning every continent of the world, Madonna conrmed her ability to recruit
a whole new generation of fans, many of whom had not been born when she
recorded her debut album.

Notes

1. The records debut was boosted by packaging the 4. M. Bego, Madonna: Blonde Ambition (New York:
album with ticket sales for the upcoming Madonna Cooper Square, 2000): p. 46.
concert tour. See www.hufngtonpost.com/2012/04/10/ 5. C. Arrington, Madonna, People, March 11, 1985.
madonnas-mdna-fail-album-sales_n_1416094.html, 6. Commanding (Review of Evita), Q (December 1996),
accessed August 30, 2012. www.pauldunoyer.com/pages/journalism/journalism_
2. Madonna (entertainer), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ item.asp?journalismID5250, accessed October 29, 2009.
Madonna_(entertainer), accessed August 23, 2011. 7. M. Murphy, Madonna Condential, TV Guide (April
3. Madonna, (October 2010), http://www.forbes.com/ 1117, 1998).
prole/madonna/, accessed November 2 2011.

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