Madonna 2020 Palladium Residency

I also went on the Sunday and though somewhat more positive your thoughts chime with my own. Vogue at the beginning looked like the whole thing was going to be a disaster as she hobbled around the stage though it did pick up from then.

The Madame X worked better than I expected given I'm not overly familiar with the songs but the highlights were Frozen and Like A Prayer and the energy level from the audience picked up a lot during them.

The constant barbs at Westminster Council were tiring, particularly when she blamed them for not being able to do the whole show and yes she never sounds particularly natural or relaxed when speaking in public so her chat with the kid and Alan Cumming was painful at times.

I sill enjoyed it and my husband, who's never seen her before, loved it but yeah I wouldn't rush to the next one and it wasn't a patch on Drowned World - though I am slightly biased there as I accidentally ended up with front row tickets for that one!

I didn't have tickets and then the day after the first show a girl in the office was saying that she'd heard there were returns for the next night so she called the box office and they told her they had restricted view tickets for £25. She then decided she didn't want them so I took the phone off her and took two tickets. 

My mate and I went the next night and we were miles up in the gods but could mostly see fine, there was a slight obstruction but nothing major. Now we had sat down quite early which was odd as we hadn't even stopped to get drinks which I would normally always do. We were sitting there chatting and I noticed a woman with ID going round chatting to people in the audience. She came over to us and she asked, are you big fans, are you really excited about the concert, ready to make lots of noise etc etc which of course we were both saying yes definitely to.

At that point she said she worked for the promoters and that Madonna likes having big fans in the front rows as she feeds off their energy and finds sometimes she gets music industry people in who aren't enjoying themselves enough (weirdly my mate worked in the music industry and later he could be like that at gigs as he saw so many!) so what she has been asked to do was find big fans and give them front row tickets and would we like to go and sit in the front row! Now my mate was French and didn't follow the conversation that well and said after I just saw you got more and more excited so it had to be a good thing.

So we of course said yes we would want front row tickets and she took us downstairs handed us off to some other people who took us to the front row seats, we got the last two which were right in the middle. I remember saying to my friend we really should have got a drink if we're going to be right here but once it started it was so intense particularly as she was often looking directly at us we didn't need it, we went crazy particularly once she played Beautiful Stranger and Ray Of Light back to back.

There was aparently a plan to do the small theatre tour for the album and then a stadium greatest hits tour once that was over with.

Don't know how that go now with her 'injury'...

Short answer is yes. The most critically acclaimed show of her career and fantastic fan feedback. Honestly, even the Daily Mail gave it the thumbs up and let me tell you - the woman doesn’t give free tickets to the press. Almost every review has said how the price tag high but worth it and that’s at home and abroad.




If she lowers her prices a bit I really see no reason why she couldn’t do 12 weeks on broadway and then 12 weeks in London. I loved the show but where it really shone was during the moment she allowed ‘Madonna: The Artist’ to take centre stage over ‘Madonna: Popstar’, and would love to see her build on that. I’m guessing she had to juggle the two because it’s still very much a concert and not a theatre show, but at times it was like watching an art installation and something she could never do in a stadium.

Interestingly she self directed this tour, so I can really see her wanting to take on the challenge of working out how it could have been better and applying that to a new show (assuming she hasn’t hated the experience). I quite like the idea of her doing album tours in theatres and perhaps arenas and stadiums for bigger greatest hits tours.

Madge has probably toured more in the last 20 years than she did in her peak years. Film work and having her children probably stopped her touring as much as she might have done in the 1990's.

Having checked back on her tour info, nearly every show she has played as a major artist she has sold out so is still a huge live draw despite playing a fair number of concerts in more recent years.

These shows are clearly something she wanted to do.

I think she needs to get this tour finished and get her injury sorted and then she can consider when and if she wants to play live in the future again.

Madonna doesn't need to tour and if she couldn't give the sort of show she wants to then she probably wouldn't. But she must also know that at 61 she cannot do the sort of shows she was doing 20 let alone well over 30 years ago as regards all the more faster dance routines or certainly do them less.

She can concentrate on her vocals more, still have the great visuals and have dancers working abound her but not do so much dancing herself or just spread the shows out more. If she needs 2 days off after a show then do that.

Actually Warner offered her more money than Live Nation, but she had a broken relationship with them by the time her contract was coming to an end: she wanted to release Impressive Instant as a single and Warner refused, saying they would release Amazing instead. Madonna then refused to record a video for Amazing, so Warner said they’d use footage from Drowned World Tour - so Madonna cut the song from the tour. They told her they were releasing GHV2 and she didn’t want to - so she refused to record any new songs, a photo shoot or promotion.

Then after she finished her Re-invention Tour they came to her and demanded an album when she didn’t want to do one (which then became Confessions on a Dance Floor). So when she started contract negotiations after Confessions Tour, she was well and truly over Warner’s interference.

Sadly she was better under them because they made sure she release an album ever 3 years. But prior to leaving them she had worked with Live Nation on 3 tours (over 5 years) and based on industry changes, that was where the money was - last millennia you toured to sell your album, this millennia you release an album to promote your tour... and Madge is responsible for the touring industry charging high prices - everyone saw her double her prices in 2004 and thought they could get away with it too.

That said, Madge was holding on well in the download era - iTunes is the reason why Hung Up and 4 Minutes went top ten in the US (as she was still banned from radio back then... now she’s just too old). But yes, when she left Warner her new label refused to put out physical releases and the Madonna collector market was huge - Warner would always release 2 CDs and either a 12” or a picture disc (and her vinyl sales were very healthy prior to the resurgence of vinyl in recent years).

Her new label did however mess up her lead single releases which didn’t help her charts - Give Me All Your Luvin’ was gifted when you pre-ordered MDNA and the charts company refused to count them as sales (it changed its mind and altered the chart rules to allow it a few months later), and Living For Love was only added to streaming services/iTunes the same day as the Brit awards - giving her only 3 days of sales before the song entered the charts. Then with Medellin she didn’t stand a chance in a streaming world.

Even young artists are inflating their album sales figures via tour ticket sales - thing like the 'verified fan' schemes that give you pre-sale tickets by buying albums, etc. There are die-hard fans buying multiple copies of albums (plus streaming the music for hours on end) to make sure they get all the tickets they want.

Big bad Warners making her record her biggest album in years and her best tour since her brother left

Her music quality has dropped immensely since she left them.

Nothing could've saved MDNA, it is an insipid album. Absolutely terrible from start to finish. You could tell she just didn't care about it.

I don't think we can blame her for the ticket price thing, advertising companies started taking over touring companies and that's when everyone's prices went up, though no one else apart from her and the Stones took it to frankly immoral levels.

According to Forbes website Madge is worth a cool $570 million which equates to about £440 million.

That's how much she is 'worth' now, but she has earned over a billion dollars so she's spent half of it already lol

In 2003 her rep confirmed (meaning they corrected a NYTimes article) she had had generated music sales in excess of $2 billion. This is before she became a serious touring machine and before she got serious shares in Live Nation (as part of her deal with them back in 2007).

Houses aside and divorces aside (“Lawyers suck it up, didn’t have a pre-nup”), I believe Madonna’s biggest indulgence is her art collection - she’s been buying art since the 1980s. She did an interview about it years ago and I know she owns works by Warhol, Picasso, Emins and Frida Khalo. I forget the name of the artist, but those big nude female paintings in her ‘Open Your Heart’ video - she owns the originals of those too. Her brother talked about it quite a bit in his exposé.

Yes, I know exactly what generating means. Warner gave Madonna a huge amount of leeway though in over to keep her over the years. She owns the publishing rights on almost everything she’s ever released, has written almost everything she’s ever released and made sure that whatever she recorded, her label only ever owned the songs she submitted to them and that could only ever release music in a format she agreed.

That is why we never see expanded or special versions of her previous albums - Warner doesn’t own anything else to put on them. No outtakes, no unreleased songs, no demos... nothing. Plus even if they did, their agreement with Madonna is that she must approve also approve any new compilation album or revised track list of existing releases.

Rumour has it she’s either buy or in the process of buying her masters back from them too. There’s some copyright law in the US that means you can buy them back after 35 years or something.

Her gross ticket sales are also in excess of $1.1 billion too. I might be misquoting the specifics here, but I’m fairly sure Madonna takes home 80% of every ticket sold and then pays out her bills from that etc (starting with Sticky and Sweet).