Lionel Richie, sold 200,000 copies of his “Tuskegee” album, his best debut in 20 years. Madonna‘s “MDNA” album is expected be the number 1 album in the country this week – the final numbers will come in later today. Unlike Lionel Richie, Madonna will bundle album with ticket sales to lock down the number 1 spot.

It turns out that a hefty number of “MDNA” albums weren’t sold the usual way. Madonna’s label, Interscope, and Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, bundled the album with her ticket sales. For every ticket sold online to Madonna’s upcoming shows, purchasers automatically receive a copy of “MDNA.”  They get a link to a free purchase on ITunes, or they can send in their mailing address for a physical CD. It doesn’t matter if the concert ticket is $52 or $350. It’s a smart marketing move for Interscope. It unnaturally inflates sales, and uses “MDNA” for what albums have become–souvenirs, or loss leaders. (Forbes)

Is it fair to artists on the chart who didn’t “bundle”?

Last year, retailers and others objected when amazon.com did a 99 cent promotion with Lady Gaga for her “Born this Way” album. But Interscope (again Interscope) sold their bulk of CDs in first two weeks. The amazon promotion inflated Gaga’s sales by 440,000 copies to 1.1 million. And then sales tapered off. The Richie album, by the way, is “hot.” So the real test will be whether “MDNA” has legs beyond the promotion.

Buzz Track: Doses

Makari released an EP titled “The Escape” which was recorded with Jason Andrews  in Atlanta, GA. The second single titled “Doses” was just released was recorded with Brooks Paschal (Paramore, Panic At The Disco, Versa Emerge, There For Tomorrow). They were featured as an unsigned artist of the month in Alternative Press and they will perform the Florida Music Fest in Orlando, FL on April 19th.

Contact: makariband@gmail.com

Lexie Hofer – Love Sick
Act As If – Walk Out On Me
Super Water Sympathy – Cherokee
The Rassle – 21
Mikey Wax – Counting On You
Kill The Drive – Monsters in My Bed
Antonia Vai – Moth to a Flame
Ready Goes – Famous

Buzz Track: Tonight

Kings favorite, singer-songwriter Tiffany Kuenzi has been creating a buzz. Her most recent and recorded song ‘Tonight’ is the reason she’s been asked to perform NashVegas Live!, an event that takes place during the American Country Awards. She has established her own record label called Kona Dog Records. Kuenzi will spend the next several weeks in Nashville writing and recording.

Contact: ordiner@aol.com

The New Yorker published an article titled ‘The Song Machine, The hit makers behind Rihanna’.

Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean who has written smash hooks for Rihanna and Nicki Minaj.

Ester Dean has a genius for infectious hooks.

Among Dean’s best hooks are her three Rihanna smashes—“Rude Boy” (“Come on, rude boy, boy, can you get it up / Come on, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?”), “S&M” (“Na-na-na-na COME ON”), and “What’s My Name” (“Oh, na-na, what’s my name?”), all with backing tracks by Stargate—and her work on two Nicki Minaj smashes, “Super Bass” (“Boom, badoom, boom / boom, badoom, boom / bass / yeah, that’s that super bass”) and David Guetta’s “Turn Me On” (“Make me come alive, come on and turn me on”).

Things slowed down when people got fed up with Stargate’s sound..

In 2004, things suddenly slowed down for Stargate in the U.K. “People got fed up with Stargate’s sound—things change fast in the music business—and there was no work,” Eriksen told me. “We were sitting back in Norway wondering, What do we do now? Should we shut it down? Our manager, Tim, said, ‘Let’s just go to New York, book a studio, and give it a shot there.’ We didn’t have much money left, but we paid for the trip. No one here knew who we were. We had a few sessions with writers, but nothing substantial. Our goal was to sell one song, and we did, we sold one, so we came back for one more week of sessions, and then we were going to call it quits.”

Today, hit songs are mainly composed by 3 people and it must contain hook after hook.

The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.

Read the rest of the article here