On June 5, a month and a half ago, Madonna premiered a 10-minute short film about her new album, ‘Confessions II’, at the Tribeca Festival. The project can only be considered a success after selling the film as a whole. Although none of the album’s promotional singles have finished working particularly well, the album will sell 500,000 copies in its first month, the same as its predecessor, ‘Madame X’, has sold in 7 years.
However, a comment has followed the singer on social media ever since: “DANCETERIA FULL MUSIC VIDEO WHEN?” It is usually the most repeated and best valued comment of all their publications on Instagram or YouTube, users who ask when the video comes out increasingly border on the meme, and until the other day at a work lunch, the director of Muzikalia asked me why the ‘Danceteria’ video wasn’t coming out. As if I could do something!
Unfortunately, we must begin to rule out the existence of such a video clip. The song has been on the most important playlist in the United Kingdom, Radio One, for 3 weeks, but they just removed it. Their streams have not taken off in any country on this side or the other of the Atlantic. The song spends its last week in the British top 100 after falling from 38 to 75 and from there to 95 yesterday. And suspiciously, a “lyric video” has been released on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube, which Warner has also begun to promote with ads, boosting its visits. Would you spend a major on a lyric video if there was a real video on the way?
The visual idea for ‘Danceteria’, a song in which Madonna remembers her beginnings, with an unprecedented funk setting, several nods to ‘Music’ and one especially apt one to Lou Reed, was sumptuous. We see Madonna replicating the hairdryer scene from ‘Into the Groove’, dressed as ‘Ray of Light’ but with her bun in ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ mode. That is, at a party, carrying a cassette of her first demo ‘Everybody’, ready to give all the hype to the fashionable DJ, in a bathroom where there are no cameras or cell phones, on the contrary there is cruising and oral sex in the booths, and “everyone is a work of art.” Even before the cameos of Kate Moss (“hide the cocaine”), Benedict Cumberbatch, Arca, Honey Dijon, Shygirl, her friend Debi Mazar and the footballers in advance of the World Cup halftime, that “everyone here is a piece of art” was iconic.
But the original plan was not to make a video for this song in its entirety, or for any of them, but rather to tell the whole thing more. Madonna explained in Tribeca that the video clip format seemed obsolete to her, probably burned from having invested a huge amount of money in the zillions of ‘Madame
It is not an issue that concerns only Madonna. Taylor Swift’s ‘Opalite’ video has only 27 million streams on YouTube when the song exceeds 800 million on Spotify, and Olivia Rodrigo’s latest videos – all hits – range between a very sad 20 and 50 million views. The days of billion views have passed even for BTS (145 million for ‘Swim’). YouTube’s audience has moved to TikTok, Instagram and even the video platforms that both Spotify and Apple Music are promoting.
YouTube’s audience has moved to TikTok, Instagram and even the video platforms that both Spotify and Apple Music are promoting
Madonna seemed to make the right decision. Due to this strategy and others, it has been number 1 album in almost 20 countries around the world, in all major markets except Germany and Japan. But the release of the video for ‘Bring Your Love’ with Sabrina Carpenter, which people felt was improvised and culminated with AI, has generated a lot of confusion. It can be considered the only misstep in an otherwise excellent campaign, which will be studied as a “rebranding” of a “legacy act”, and as any launch in general.
Firstly, the visual result of ‘Bring Your Love’ is not up to par: except for the addition of the carpet scene, from which Madonna is thrown, it adds nothing. Its sound effects, stops and fills cut through the whole thing. Secondly, it wastes Sabrina Carpenter, when Sabrina Carpenter’s strength is her hilarious and multi-faceted music videos! And thirdly and more seriously, it has made people think that there could be a video for the other songs in the short, especially for ‘Danceteria’, a song so loved by its fans that it was applauded at the listening parties from the second zero.
«The script for that fragment of ‘Danceteria’ seems to have been designed ad hoc for that fragment of the short. It is not a “preview” of a video clip.
But the problem is that the fragment of ‘Danceteria’ for the short had a very particular structure: it omitted the first pre-chorus of the song and the chorus. In this way, he chose to juxtapose 2 stanzas that were not followed. His script seems to have been designed ad hoc for that fragment of the short. It is not a “preview” of a video clip. If Madonna mentioned her friend Martin, the actor who plays her friend Martin appeared. If he mentioned his friend Debi Mazar, he found his friend Debi Mazar. If I mentioned DJ Mark Kamins, the actor who plays Mark Kamins would appear.
Perhaps it could easily be achieved – with outtakes or extras or labels or something from the World Cup – an explosive ending for the song that it is strange that it was not filmed, but it seems that it has not been filmed. But if now, through montage or editing, anything In the pre-chorus and chorus part that is missing, right between the two verses, the video would lose narrative strength and dynamism.
The figures have proven Madonna’s initial idea right: even with a notable advertising push from Warner, the video for ‘Bring Your Love’ has gone much further than 10 million views. It has not at all boosted the song’s commercial journey. It has by no means enriched it artistically. It’s just there. People are asking for a video to be published no matter what, which worsens the image we have of ‘Danceteria’.
Madonna’s team has failed in this case because people don’t know what is happening. At one point, they could have leaked to unofficial websites like DrownedMadonna that there was not going to be a video for ‘Danceteria’ (and it is not known what happened to a “radio edit” and a Seth Troxler remix that were listed in the variant with remixes “Afterhours”). What the average user finds are images of the short that have gone viral on social media, and no one really knows where to go to finish watching. Many more millions of people see fragments of the ‘Danceteria’ video on Instagram or TikTok than the entire short, which is sweating to reach 6 million views on YouTube.
In a surreal twist, we can now see the “making of” of the video but not the video, not even in its 2-minute fragment on official channels. Let’s hope that this article acts as a charm so that Madonna will give us another of the many blows that this era has given us, but each day it will be a little more “too late.”
