THE GLOVES ARE OFF

Mariah v článku pro Times Online UK kritizuje hudební vydavatelství, že zaspala dobu. Měla by se podle ní soustředit na digitální prodej, který v dnešní době vede nad prodejem fyzických CD, a to dle vlastních podmínek přímo na jejich webech a na oficiálních stránkách umělců. MC probírá zapojení umělců do nehudebních projektů (reklamy, vlastní módní řady, ad.), stavbu nahrávacího studia na ostrovu Eleuthera na Bahamách, zapojení se do podpory turismu v New Yorku a vlastní řadě kosmetiky, oblečení a doplňků pod značkou Mimi - "Nechci to zkazit tím, že vyberu co mám ráda já, protože to by byla blbost."


MARIAH CAREY: THE GLOVES ARE OFF
The singer drops the sugar-coated simpering and shoots from the lip about the music industry and her new business model to save it — which could make her the world's richest recording artist

"Would you like a drink? I'd get you one myself but it's a little hard for me to get up right now." Mariah Carey isn't kidding. She's lying on her back in a darkened room in the basement of the TV Asahi studios in Tokyo, dressed in a black miniskirt, a leopard-print Dolce & Gabbana trench coat and 8in Gucci bitch stacks. Her stylist, Blair, is "jujjing" her hair to make sure each lock falls "just so" over lashes that are as lacquered as a coffee table. "Go ahead, ruin it," she says when Blair tugs too hard. "Wait 'til I'm done speaking, dahling," the singer scolds when her manager, Louise, interrupts to ask what diet she's on today. The singer is surrounded by Hello Kitty dolls that her fans have customised to look like her, complete with breasts so big the toys look like they've got footballs stuffed down their crop tops.

What's on Carey's mind? Not whether she can hit the metal-piercing high notes in her version of I Want to Know What Love Is. She's covering the Foreigner ballad on Music Station, Japan's Top of the Pops, in a few minutes' time. No, she is — bless — thinking about puppies. "My dog is having babies," she says. "Two or three puppies. Can you put that in your magazine?" Well, welcome to planet Mariah, the glittery, kittenish, snowflake place where a girl can do just what she wants, however infantile. In a city where teenage girls — dammit, grown women — dress up as schoolgirls, Carey has never looked more at home.


But then something remarkable happens. Carey sits forward, takes a sip of bitter pomegranate juice and frowns. "Frickin' idiots! Big, powerful music-industry executives made a giant mistake, and now we're all paying the price. Frickin' idiots!" The 12-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom worrying about boys, make-up and simpering over "ickle" animals is gone. In her place is a steely 39-year-old who has just flown in from Seoul, has been working since 6.30am and whose voice is suddenly so hoarse and sardonic she sounds like Alan Sugar at the end of a bad day. "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."

There are many things you expect from an encounter with Mariah Carey — ear-drum-endangering squeaks, emotional fragility, an unshiftingly winsome gaze, and bowls of M&M's — just the blue ones. A reasoned critique of the state of the music industry is not one of them. But under the skin of this twittering popsicle is a businesswoman who has sold more singles, albums and downloads in the US than any other female artist, even Madonna. The multi-Grammy-award-winner has had more US No 1 hits than any other soloist dead or alive. Her first five singles each went to No1 — another record — and she has more platinum singles than any other female artist. Three more Billboard 100 No 1s and she will overhaul the 29-year-old record held by the Beatles for the most US No 1s ever.

She's also 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, put the Glitter away and came back with a critically lauded album, The Emancipation of Mimi, that put her back on the hot list. And if that weren't enough, she might now — just might — have stumbled upon the secret formula to save the music industry from financial fade-out.

Carey is pioneering a new business model for music. She's cutting deals with the kind of partners musicians have traditionally shunned, pushing herself into new areas such as publishing, tourism and food and drink. She's partnering with the biggest retailers in the world. And she's harnessing the power of the internet, not just to sell music via iTunes, Napster or Spotify, but to market herself using social-networking sites, notably Facebook and Twitter. Simon Cowell, a man who knows a thing or two about making money in the modern music world, believes diversification is the future. He and his close friend, the BHS billionaire Sir Philip Green, are creating a giant music and merchandising company dubbed "Britain's answer to Disney".

Carey's new album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, is released here tomorrow. She has been in London publicising it. Artists always fly into the world's biggest cities to sing for their sales but Carey is doing it in a new way. Take her recent trip to Tokyo. There are endless TV spots — TV drives sales; TV means fans. But how to get the right kind of fans; who will look good on TV? And how to get the right number outside every venue where she's appearing, to make her look like a megastar, but not so many that she is mobbed? If only they could be handpicked.

They can. Online. Carey's itinerary, which is supposed to be top secret but which an aide has helpfully left lying on a table, reveals that she uses the internet to leak details of each appearance to favoured bloggers and Facebook groups shortly beforehand. This way, only the most devoted fans turn up, and freaks and weirdos are weeded out. The selective leaks also help to make sure there are enough paparazzi but not so many that there's a scrum. Just before she is due to arrive at the Asahi studios to appear on Music Station, Carey's aides "leaked the time she will appear at entrance through social online sites, blogs, etc. We are expecting to have 100 fans and some paparazzi", the schedule reveals. The cybertrickery works to script. Just after 6pm, Carey pulls up in her stretch limousine and steps out into a small but perfectly formed crowd.

That week, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel is released in Japan. When you buy the 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. This is no ordinary edition of the glossy; this is "Elle for Mariah". It's full of the usual fashion, beauty and relationships stuff but it's all about Carey. There's everything you need to "Mariah up your life!" An additional 500,000 copies have been distributed in the US edition of Elle.

It's marketing, of course, but with the all-important Elle seal of approval. Elle writers wrote it all and Elle photographers took the pictures. Brand analysts say getting an established, credible media partner such as Elle to do Carey's marketing for her is priceless. Rita Clifton, the chairman of London's leading brand consultancy, Interbrand, says: "Elle is fashionable and extremely professional. If Mariah Carey is to succeed in marketing products beyond music, it's critical that she gets stylish associations and polished presentation. Elle can bring those."

There are ads in the magazine, too, for Angel Champagne, upscale Le Metier de Beaute 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.

Some ads are for Carey's own products, such as her signature perfume, Forever. Some are for products produced by companies in which she has a stake, notably Angel champagne. Some are for firms in which Universal Music has a stake, such as Le Metier de Beaute. Some are for brands for which she acts as an ambassador, notably the Bahamas. Every time one of Carey's fans buys one of the products she's marketing, she gets a cut.

The "product integration" deal has covered most of the cost of recording Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, estimated at £4m. It has also created new partnerships and strengthened existing ones. And, of course, it gives fans something tangible and unique — but only if they buy the physical CD, where margins are often better than for online downloads. The physical magazine is not available online. Other artists are looking to exploit the advertorial-meets-ads model on forthcoming albums, including the Killers, Rihanna, Duffy and Bon Jovi. Rihanna, for instance, is in talks with brands and advertisers, including Gucci, Nike, Clinique, CoverGirl and the Barbados Tourism Authority. It's not hard to see why. Merchandising is a huge business. In the US, Disney franchises, including the popular Hannah Montana and High School Musical, raked in $2.7 billion in retail sales last year alone.

Carey knows she is the last person anyone would look to for business acumen. "People look at my image and they see, oh, the curly hair and the little tight black dress. Tra-la-la," she grins. What's more, she herself used to revile the very marketing she is now taking to new levels. "When I was starting my career I'd look at certain people who worked with, say, Pepsi, and I was like, 'Why do they need to do that?' I had an offer from a soda company when I first began. They wanted me to hit a high note and then the glass bottle would break. I told them, 'I think it's stupid. It's tacky. I don't want to do it."

What changed her mind? The traditional business model for the recorded music industry is bust. Has been for years. CD sales are down again this year, by 13%, as online downloads grow, according to the ratings agency Nielsen. The Big Four record companies — Universal, Sony, Warner and the ailing EMI — sell two-thirds fewer albums than they did in 2000. Carey is furious that music-industry executives failed to realise how the internet would change the way fans consume music. And when the penny finally dropped, they let the computer, not the music, industry corner the market. Over time, many more copies of Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel will be downloaded online than bought in stores. Buyers will go to sites such as iTunes or Napster to do so, not to Carey's own website, nor that of Island Def Jam. The iTunes music store passed six billion sales earlier this year and has also driven sales of Apple's iPod and iPhone.

"A lot of big powerful music-industry executives made a giant mistake," she says. "They gave the music business away on the internet. If they had just sat back and said, 'Maybe let's figure this internet thing out, it could be something cool,' we could have found a way to distribute music online on our own terms, not somebody else's. Prince had already shown them the way. He was so far ahead of the curve, putting out his own records on the web. Everyone else was stupid."

Musicians have long promoted non-music products. The Rolling Stones marketed Windows 95 with Start Me Up. Michael Jackson did endless Pepsi promos. And rappers such as P Diddy and Jay-Z have moved on from name-checking other people's fashion and luxury-goods brands in their songs to create their own brands, usually in partnership with their record labels, and promote them instead. But Carey is breaking new ground in three areas.

First, she is turning on its head the traditional model of endorsement. With Elle, for example, she is not endorsing the magazine; the magazine is endorsing her. Yet it is Carey, not the magazine, who is trousering most of the cash generated by ad sales. The way she pulled off such a lucrative deal is nifty. Elle and the US cosmetics giant Elizabeth Arden had fallen out. Arden makes Carey's perfume, Forever. What better way to bring the two back together — and get Arden ads back in Elle — than in a one-off special magazine celebrating an Arden product and an Arden ambassador? "I'm just trying to share the love," she says. And corner the market.

Second, when Carey is endorsing a non-music product, she does not simply want to do deals through her record label; she personally wants to own all or part of the company that makes the product. You make a whole lot more cash that way. She is forming so many new companies to leverage her brand equity in make-up, clothing and other new areas that her New York lawyers are fast running out of names. "I set up a new business for every project," she says. "The businesses are called things like Mirage and Maroon Entertainment. They're based on silly names that I made up in high school."

Third, she sees ways to make money with partners that others have overlooked. She has a house in the Bahamas on the island of Eleuthera. She won't say if she is paid by the Bahamas tourist board to talk about how great the place is but you'd be forgiven for thinking she is, given the amount of time she spends doing so. And even if she isn't, she probably soon will be. She's building a recording studio on Eleuthera and plans to shoot videos there with the director Brett Ratner. It's the kind of publicity a small country dreams of and it would scarcely be surprising if the government there helped out. Carey also plans to team up with the New York tourist board to attract visitors to her adopted home town. When she had her 18th No1, the city authorities lit up the Empire State Building in her favourite colours: pink and lavender. It was good publicity for Carey and for New York. Expect to see "Mariah in New York" advertisements soon. "There are no limits to what we can do," she says. "The process of creating something should have no boundaries."

So far, so entrepreneurial. But is it really Carey doing the work? And even if she is, is she any good, or is there someone there to hold her hand? The day after she arrives in Tokyo, she's sitting in the boardroom of the Park Hyatt. The hotel is best known for failing relationships, principally Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson's: much of Lost in Translation was filmed here. But Carey is trying to forge a new relationship. She's meeting a leading cosmetics manufacturer to discuss plans to launch a Mariah Carey beauty line in a top US supermarket chain.

Okay, there may be wine on the table — this is still rock'n'roll — but Carey is focused. She's brought with her two of her own cosmetics bags, a glittery Chanel number and an acid-pink vanity case, to illustrate what she wants the packaging for her line to look like. She's also brought an interesting new mini MP3 player she found in Korea that she wants to customise, so that it can be sold as an accessory to the make-up. She benchmarks her proposed line against others: Bobbi Brown, Anna Sui, Laura Mercier. But she listens too. "You tell me," she says when discussing the colours for the cosmetics. "I don't want to mess it up by liking what I like and enforcing that because that would be a stupid thing to do. I don't want to screw up."

The more you see her at work, the more you realise that Carey has grasped not just how her industry must move from a recorded-music business model to a brand-based model, but also that she is the best person to do it. Ask what her "brand" is, and she replies as well as any Madison Avenue advertising executive: "Optimistic, accessible, universal." It's true. Her music is the kind of upbeat, bubblegum pop that appeals as much to teenagers in Tokyo as in Tooting. "It's R&B but not too R&B. It's poppy but not too poppy. Hardcore but not too hardcore," she says. She dresses trendy "but not too trendy. I never want people to think I just wear 'this' or 'that' designer and that they cannot afford my stuff." Her team work remorselessly to make sure fans get what they want. "We try very hard to answer everything we get sent," says Carey. "We mustn't get remote or ever give people the chance to think I think I'm better than them."

And then there is her killer app: her image. The daughter of a black father and an Irish-American mother — a classically trained opera singer who studied at Juilliard — she's black enough to appeal to a black audience. She was one of only two black female soloists asked to sing at Michael Jackson's memorial. But she's not so black that she alienates a white audience. She's also a little Latina. Her father was half-African-American, half-Venezuelan, so she can exploit that market, too. She deliberately plays with her ethnicity, changing her hair to be a little bit more white or a little bit more black, according to what she's doing and where. "I change ethnically according to where I am in the world. I can be a spokesperson for black, white and Latina. MC could stand for multicultural."

Being every kind of woman makes her the right person to sell, well, just about anything. But however powerful her name and image may be, Carey is also savvy enough to realise that, if she's really going to cash in, she must appeal to those who might like her products but don't like her. That's why she's working on a second line of beauty products, clothes and accessories using her nickname, Mimi, as the brand and the logo. "Mimi is an iteration of Mariah Carey. Any girl can be Mimi. If someone is not a complete fan, they don't have to worry," she says.

There is a problem with all this, of course. Carey is an artist, and whether you like her music or not, she's undeniably a successful one. "I'm a studio rat. I love writing and collaborating. The music comes first." Unlike sports stars, who are not considered cultural figures and who have a very short career to make the money they need for a lifetime, musicians have always had problems moving out of music and into new areas. Even those, notably U2's Bono, who have tried to harness their music and celebrity for good causes, have been condemned as opportunists. Surely, for her to plaster her name over $3 lipgloss in Macy's department stores is the quickest way to be labelled — oh, what's the right expression? — a big, cheesy sellout?

Carey concedes that filling supermarket shelves with anything other than CDs "is not ideal". Nor does she enjoy working as hard as she is. "Do I want to do 50 things a day that have little or nothing to do with the music itself? No." But she says the economics of recorded music means she has no choice. The time is right personally, too. Knocking on 40 and just married to the TV executive Nick Cannon, she's not quite so determined to strive for perfection in her professional and personal life, an attitude summed up in the title of her new album and her new film, Precious, which has just been released in the US and is out here soon.

It tells the harrowing story of a 350lb illiterate teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time by her father and horribly abused by her mother. Carey is unrecognisable as a welfare caseworker, in no small part because she is seen, for the first time, without any make-up — a bold move for a woman who wants to save the music industry one eyeliner at a time. The film's director, Lee Daniels, offered Carey the part on condition that she show up at the set alone (no entourage) in a taxi (no limo) and freshly scrubbed (no make-up). The film received a standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes and went on to win three awards at the Sundance film festival.

Carey knows her new business model is controversial, so, just in case Coldplay's Chris Martin or Radiohead's Thom Yorke accuse her of cashing in when the first copies of her new album are opened here this week, she's getting her retaliation in first. "I don't care if the rock-band person thinks, 'Oh, I'm a sellout'. Well, guess what? They're a sellout anyway for going to a record company. I'm sorry — you are. You want to just play in bands in bars? Then do that. Or play on the streets. And if someone throws you some dollars, then you can go get a soda. But you could also help somehow merge the soda business with the music business in a way that is creative."

At which moment Louise, the manager, turns up at the door with the not-so-secret schedule. "We have another meeting back at the hotel," Carey says, "9pm and still working. And we're off to LA tomorrow." She hoists herself up slowly from her chaise longue, asks whether there are any stairs on the way to the limo — walking in 8in heels ain't easy — and tells a flunky to round up the gaudy Hello Kitty dolls and take them to the limo. "I have to have my little toys," she gushes. The 12-year-old girl is back. It's what her emotionally incontinent Japanese fans demand. But don't be fooled. The woman tottering off down the corridor, putting on her bug-eyed sunglasses before stepping out into the latest perfectly formed instacrowd of fans and paparazzi, is the music industry's next top model.