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Warner Music Records: Madonna is our Queen (source: CNN Finance)

* She ain't dead for sho!! *

CEO Edgar Bronfman's effort to adapt a storied label for the digital age could provide a blueprint for the salvation of the recording industry--and of the reputation of one of America's most intriguing moguls.CNN Money News– The lights were dim. Scented white candles guttered and glowed, arrayed around a towering arrangement of white flowers that were themselves encircled by chairs draped in white linens. Madonna

was in the house. The house in this instance was a conference room at the New York headquarters of Warner Music Group last June, and despite the efforts to set the mood, the vibe was anything but relaxed. CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. and a handful of top Warner executives had gathered to hear Madonna's as-yet-unreleased album, Confessions on a Dance Floor. Bronfman was particularly edgy; Madonna's last record had bombed, and the onetime undisputed diva, now 47 years old, seemed perilously poised between one last shot at clawing back into the limelight or sliding further into faded stardom--and, more to the point for Warner, commercial oblivion. Yet as he listened, Bronfman was relieved, then thrilled. Track after track sounded like classic Madonna, the kind of music that had made her a global superstar, selling roughly 200 million albums for Warner over her career. When the CD ended, Bronfman stood up, turned to Madonna, and said, "You are our queen." The moment was more than the beginning of one pop luminary's comeback. It may ultimately be looked back on as the moment when the recording industry, so baffled for so long by all things digital, started to get its own act together. With Confessions, Bronfman and his lieutenants put an entirely new way of selling music to the test. It involved not just traditional marketing--most notably a campaign with Motorola to promote the Rokr phone--but also a string of digital firsts. Warner teamed up with France Telecom and other carriers to release a ringtone of the single "Hung Up" a month before the song was released. The impact was swift: In France, for instance, so many fans downloaded the 20-second tune to their phones that DJs, unable to get their hands on the CD itself, began broadcasting the ringtone on radio. The ringtone release also helped draw in a younger audience. Then, instead of releasing the entire album at once, Warner let France Telecom's Internet customers and iTunes users download the single if they preordered the album. It also sold the single along with a video and, with the official release of the album last November, offered a digital dance-mix version in which all the tracks blend together. The upshot? All variations of Madonna's release jumped to the top of the charts--in the physical world as well as the digital..Remarkably, this happened as Confessions got less than half as much radio play as releases from other top artists, according to Warner research. Even more encouraging for Warner was that many fans paid $3 extra to download the video from iTunes along with the album. Now, just four months after its release, Confessions has sold more than 7 million CDs worldwide, generating by analysts' estimates roughly $100 million for Warner--and that doesn't include the tens of millions in additional revenues from digital downloads.