On the off chance that you’ve been pulling a Rip van Winkle for the better part of the aughts, we have some tough news to break to you: The music industry is in the shitter! Labels are shutting down left and right, music-business execs have been forced to take up residence in the breadlines, and CD sales have plummeted substantially (down 14 percent this year alone). So, naturally, the industry is looking for new and exciting ways to generate the revenue necessary to keep its operations afloat. Well, today we learned that Island Def Jam is taking the new but most certainly not exciting step of including advertisements within the CD booklet that will accompany Mariah Carey’s new LP, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel. People who plunk down their hard-earned money for the CD will get access to a 34-page “mini-magazine†containing adverts for Elizabeth Arden, Angel Champagne, and the Bahamas Board of Tourism (!), among other advertisers. If the record industry is trying to give consumers new reasons to take a few minutes to learn exactly how to get a BitTorrent client working on their home computers, we think it’s succeeded!
Mariah Carey’s “Memoirs†to Include Mini-Magazine and Advertisements [Rock & Roll Daily/RS]