Hard Candy

Thomas Husson | March 18, 2008, 07:47 AM

7 tracks of Madonna’s new album will be distributed and promoted exclusively to Vodafone customers around the world*, 7 days prior to the April 28th global release of Madonna’s 11th studio album for Warner Bros. Records.

Those kind of partnerships between labels and operators are now more and more frequent. Bear in mind Orange/Warner partnership for Hung up / Confessions on a dance floor more than 2 years ago.

Interestingly, in its press release, Vodafone claims to be the number TWO digital music service provider overall in Europe (as pointed out by Mark Mulligan, they do not refer to being the n2 store but number 2 service provider, words matter in that context). In a recent post, I stated that Groove Mobile was the only independent music service provider. This is no longer the case, since the company has been bought by a subsidiary of NMS Communications, see the full press release here.

* UPDATED: excluding SFR (only partly-owned by Vodafone, but mainly by VIVENDI, the parent company of Universal Music)