The Daily Swarm

The Times:

She’s one of the few people successfully to screw a major record label. Virgin wanted to buy her out of a multi-album $100m contract after her 2001 semi-autobiographical film, Glitter, and companion album of the same name flopped. She took the label for a cool $49m….

“Those stupid executives may have given up on the music business but I haven’t. It’s bleak out there for musicians. We have to do something.”....

When you buy [her new Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel CD] in key markets you get the usual pictures of Carey in the white dress, in the black dress and in the gold boob-tube to sex up the silver disk. But you also get something else: a copy of Elle magazine.

There are ads in the magazine, too, for Angel Champagne, upscale Le Métier de Beauté cosmetics, Forever perfume, Carmen Steffens shoes and the Bahamas tourist board. You can even win a trip to Mariah’s favourite island in the Bahamas by logging on to her official website. Carey is behind those, too. She and her record company, Island Def Jam, part of Universal Music Group, sold the ads for up to $100,000 a page, making far more than the peppercorn Elle was paid to produce the magazine.

“I can’t tell you how little money we made on this,” says Carol Smith, the chief brand officer of Elle, ruefully.

The “product integration” deal has covered most of the cost of recording Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, estimated at £4m ($6.7 million).