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Madonna news - March 2024
← Feb. 2024 | April 2024 →
Producers of Madonna's historic Rio concert revealed
Source: Billboard - 27 March 2024Veteran promoters from North America and Brazil will collaborate on the show, which is aiming to draw 2 million fans to Copacabana Beach.
Madonna's historic concert at Rio's Copacabana Beach on May 4 will be produced by her long-time promoter Arthur Fogel and legendary Brazilian producer and promoter Luiz Oscar Niemeyer, Live Nation officials have confirmed to Billboard.
Fogel is one of the most accomplished concert and tour producers in the world and serves as the chairman of global touring at Live Nation, the world's largest concert promotion company. Fogel works with some of the world's biggest touring acts — a list that also includes Lady Gagan U2, Beyoncé and Drake.
Niemeyer, chief executive of Bonus Tracks Entretenimento, is one of Brazil's best-known promoters, having staged Paul McCartney's 1990 concert at the Maracanã Stadiun and The Rolling Stones' 2006 free concert at Copacabana Beach in 2006, which was attended by more than 1.5 million people. Niemeyer was also the creative force behind the Hollywood Rock festival, which ran from 1988 to 1996 in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Niemeyer's latest project, the Music Is The Answer festival, launched in 2022 and last year featured headliners Lana Del Rey and Florence + The Machine.
Fogel will produce the concert on behalf of Madonna, while Niemeyer will work on behalf of the City of Rio and the various sponsors, including presenting sponsor Itau bank.
The free Rio concert, which Visit Rio officials said is forecast to attract 2 million fans, will conclude the Queen of Pop's Celebration tour and cap off a career run that's netted more than $1.5 billion in ticket sales over a dozen global tours, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore through March 13, making her one of the highest grossing touring artists of time.
While the city-managed Copacabana Beach is known for hosting large concerts each New Year's Eve, headliner concerts are far more rare. The last large-scale free concert on the beach outside of New Year's was when The Rolling Stones played there more than 18 years ago as part of the group's A Bigger Bang tour.
It's official: Madonna announces historic free concert in Rio de Janeiro
Source: Madonna.com - 25 March 2024After weeks of rumours, it's now finally officially confirmed: Madonna will end her Celebration Tour with a free show on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 4th. It promises to be her largest concert of her career, and it will be broadcast live on TV Globo.
Press release from Madonna.com:
(March 25, 2024) Today, Madonna announces she will perform a historic free concert in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on Saturday, May 4th at the majestic Copacabana Beach as the culminaton of her universally praised The Celebration Tour which has been one of the most buzzed about tours of the year. The event will be her biggest gig yet, an unforgettable concert in one of the world's most beautiful settings. The show will be free of charge as a thank you to her fans for celebrating more than four decades of her music over the course of the epic global run of the tour. It will also mark the best-selling female recording artist of all time first show in Brazil since 2012. No tickets are required for the event, entrance will be applied on a first come first serve basis the day of the event at Belmond Copacabana Palace Hotel. This unforgettable, one time event and world’s biggest dancefloor will be broadcast live on TV Globo.
Information about the event can be found on www.madonnainrio.com and
www.instagram.com/bonustrack.live/
Finally: the Madonna-Kylie reunion we dreamed of for years!
Source: Social Media - 8 March 2024Fans have been hoping for years that it would happen one day. And yes, yesterday at Madonna's show in Los Angeles, she was joined on stage by Kylie Minogue! After giving each other a big hug, they sang 'I Will Survive' together, followed by Kylie's hit 'Can't Get You Out Of my Head'.
For the occasion, Kylie wore a shirt that read 'Madonna', in the same font style as the 'Kylie' shirt worn by Madonna back in 2001.
Will the Celebration Tour end with free show at Copacabana in Rio?
Source: Madonna Online - 8 March 2024For quite a while, there have been rumours circulating that Madonna will bring her Celebration Tour to Brazil. According to our friends at Madonna Online, Madonna will perform at Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro on May 4th. The concert will be free for fans, as it is being sponsored by Brazilian bank Itaù, who recently worked with Madonna on a gorgeous commercial. The location could potentially host the largest crowd ever gathered for a Madonna show and would be the perfect highlight to end her celebration of 4 decades!
Madonna is among the early adopters of AI’s next wave
Source: AP News - 5 March 2024Whenever Madonna sings the 1980s hit "La Isla Bonita" on her concert tour, moving images of swirling, sunset-tinted clouds play on the giant arena screens behind her.
To get that ethereal look, the pop legend embraced a still-uncharted branch of generative artificial intelligence – the text-to-video tool. Type some words — say, "surreal cloud sunset" or "waterfall in the jungle at dawn" — and an instant video is made.
Following in the footsteps of AI chatbots and still image-generators, some AI video enthusiasts say the emerging technology could one day upend entertainment, enabling you to choose your own movie with customizable story lines and endings. But there's a long way to go before they can do that, and plenty of ethical pitfalls on the way.
For early adopters like Madonna, who's long pushed art's boundaries, it was more of an experiment. She nixed an earlier version of "La Isla Bonita" concert visuals that used more conventional computer graphics to evoke a tropical mood.
"We tried CGI. It looked pretty bland and cheesy and she didn't like it," said Sasha Kasiuha, content director for Madonna's Celebration Tour that continues through late April. "And then we decided to try AI."
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI gave a glimpse of what sophisticated text-to-video technology might look like when the company recently showed off Sora, a new tool that's not yet publicly available. Madonna's team tried a different product from New York-based startup Runway, which helped pioneer the technology by releasing its first public text-to-video model last March. The company released a more advanced "Gen-2" version in June.
Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela said while some see these tools as a "magical device that you type a word and somehow it conjures exactly what you had in your head," the most effective approaches are by creative professionals looking for an upgrade to the decades-old digital editing software they're already using.
He said Runway can't yet make a full-length documentary. But it could help fill in some background video, or b-roll — the supporting shots and scenes that help tell the story.
"That saves you perhaps like a week of work," Valenzuela said. "The common thread of a lot of use cases is people use it as a way of augmenting or speeding up something they could have done before."
Runway's target customers are "large streaming companies, production companies, post-production companies, visual effects companies, marketing teams, advertising companies. A lot of folks that make content for a living," Valenzuela said.
Madonna recalls first words after coming out of coma
Source: Billboard - 5 March 2024Madonna is in the middle of a five-night concert run at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., as part of her Celebration Tour, but less than a year ago, she wouldn't have been able to even walk onstage.
During her Monday (March 4) concert, the 65-year-old superstar revealed that the severe bacterial infection she suffered in June 2023 — which led to her hospitalization and the postponement of her current trek — at one point made it nearly impossible for her to move around. "This summer I had a surprise," she told the crowd, holding a cowboy hat in one hand and gripping a guitar in the other. "It's called a near-death experience."
"It was pretty scary — obviously I didn't know for four days because I was in an induced coma, but when I woke up, the first word I said was, 'No,'" she continued. "I'm pretty sure God was saying to me, 'You wanna come with us? You wanna come with me, you wanna go this way?' And I said, 'No. No!'"
The "Express Yourself" singer went on to thank her doctor, who she said was in the audience and had advised her to go outside and soak up some vitamin D while she was recovering from her health scare. "It was so hard for me to walk from my house to the backyard and sit in the sun," Madge recalled. "I know that sounds insane, but it was difficult."
"I didn't know when I could get up again and when I could be myself again," the seven-time Grammy winner added. "It was a strange thing to finally not feel like I was in control. That was my lesson to let go."
After delaying the career-spanning trek over the summer, Madonna was finally able to kick off her Celebration Tour in October at the O2 Arena in London. She's currently scheduled to stay on the road through April 26, when she'll conclude the six-month run with a show at Palacio De Los Deportes in Mexico City.
At a previous concert, the Queen of Pop revealed that her six children were instrumental in pulling her out of her illness. "By the way, I had to almost die to get all my kids in one room," she joked to her Brooklyn crowd in December.
"And I was thinking, 'What if I left my children?'" she continued, more seriously. "That would destroy me to leave my children at this moment in their lives. I wasn't thinking about me. I was thinking about them, and I was thinking about my mother and how scared she must have been to know that she was going to leave us all behind."
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