Madge has never made a secret of her distrust of the Internet and music, being very vocal about her feelings over music piracy. On her last album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, she had it streamed over AOL, but with some colorful comments inserted in to each song to ruin the tunes for anyone who might be inspired to try to steal them and release them over the torrents. This time she seems to have skipped the comments, I am only on the fourth track as I write this, which is amusing since there is a complicated formula out there as to how you can strip down a MySpace page and download any embedded track you choose. So while embracing the Net, she seems to be not quite as up to speed as she may think.
As Mitch Michaels of 411Mania reminds us, she is following in the footsteps of other bands such as Nine Inch Nails, 50 Cent, R.E.M. amongst others to debut their albums on the popular social network. If it actually helps sales is a difficult thing to measure, but it could also be seen as a rather large gamble to expose an entire work to the public before sales. I must say as each track plays, I am finding myself less enthralled with this particular outing from the Material Girl. The "studio" tracks are fairly obviously cut to be remixed umpteen times by DJs like Tiësto and Paul Oakenfold, so this marketing move may have the exact opposite of the desired effect on me.