Mariah Carey's "Memoirs" to Include Mini-Magazine and Advertisements

It has come to this: Island Def Jam revealed that Mariah Carey's new album Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel will feature a 34-page booklet devoted to the diva and produced by Elle magazine, Brand Week reports. It will be stocked with articles like "VIP Access to Her Sexy Love Life" and ads for Elizabeth Arden and the Bahamas Board of Tourism, among others.

The integration of advertisements is the latest move by record companies to increase revenues as album sales continue to plummet. If the experiment succeeds, ad-packed booklets for Rihanna, Kanye West and Bon Jovi might be next.

"The idea was really simple thinking: 'We sell millions of records, so you should advertise with us,' " Island Def Jam head Antonio "L.A." Reid said of the promotional deal. "My artists have substantial circulation — when you sell 2 million, 5 million, 8 million, that's a lot of eyeballs. Most magazines aren't as successful as those records." The booklet will also appear in issues of Elle that coincide with the September 15th release of Carey's album and plans are underway to produce a digitized version of the booklet for the digital release.

Back in January 2008, Rock Daily wrote that then-EMI honcho Guy Hands flirted with the idea of corporate branding an artist, saying "Football [Soccer] teams have very distinct corporate sponsorship. Why shouldn't some of the leading bands have the same sort of relationships?"

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• EMI Chairman Confirms Cutbacks, Says Bands May Be Sponsored Like Football Teams

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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