Mobile Music: Madonna Hard Candy on Vodafone

I wrote recently about Prince distributing content for free. This time its Madonna. Her latest album Hard Candy will be pre-released on Vodafone live. Each track will remain live for 24 hours and then will be replaced with the next one.

In addition, Vodafone customers in selected markets including Spain, Portugal, Germany and Belgium will get exclusive mobile access to the newly released single “4 Minutes”, effective immediately.
On top of this there will be a Madonna micro site within Vodafone live!

From the press release
 “As the number one digital music service provider in the mobile telecommunications industry in Europe, Vodafone has revolutionised the way people experience music on their mobiles and the collaboration with Warner Music builds on this heritage,” said Frank Rovekamp, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone Group. “Through our unique insight into what our customers want and how they prefer to listen to music this is yet another example of delivering superior music experience to customers.”

John Reid, Vice Chairman WMI and President, Warner Music Europe, said, “We are delighted to be able to debut such a rich menu of content from ‘Hard Candy’ through Vodafone live! This is an innovative way to reach millions of Madonna fans around the world, building anticipation and excitement around this landmark release and helping to create a real event for Vodafone customers.”

What we think?
Now this sounds more like it. Vodafone has been notoriously bad at promoting Vodafone live! Despite some “quite good” content.

Why?
Basically, this is because of the wrong approach and a focus on cult brands rather than huge rock stars. Madonna is perfect. I will be downloading this in Germany shortly. 

Fingers crossed that Vodafone milks this better than T-Mobile when Robbie Williams was used to promote the company. T-Mobile wasted an opportunity and fingers crossed Vodafone replaces its crap cartoon style comic advertising for some pictures of the material girl.

Related News:

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3. Vodafone Germany adds Mercedes Advertising to Vodafone live!
4. Vodafone’s Music live! with Musiwave
5. Vodafone Germany launches Handy 2.0 – the mobile Internet on Vodafone live!