Last June 5, a month and a half ago, Madonna unveiled at the Tribeca Festival a 10-minute short focused on her new album, ‘Confessions II’. The project can only be regarded as a success, given that the album was sold as a complete package. Although none of the promotional singles from the record has performed particularly well, the album is expected to move 500,000 copies in its first month, the same total that its predecessor, ‘Madame X’, sold in seven years.
However, one comment has been haunting the singer on social media ever since: “DANCETERIA FULL MUSIC VIDEO WHEN?”. This tends to be the most repeated and highly valued remark across all her Instagram or YouTube posts, with fans who ask when the video will drop edging closer to becoming a meme every day. In a work lunch just yesterday, the Muzikalia editor even asked me why the video for ‘Danceteria’ hadn’t appeared yet. As if I could do anything!
Unfortunately, one must start ruling out the existence of such a music video. The track spent three weeks on the UK’s most important playlist, Radio One’s, but has just been dropped. Its streams have not really taken off anywhere, neither on this side of the Atlantic nor the other. The track is spending its final week in the UK Top 100 after dropping from 38 to 75, and then to 95 yesterday. And, rather suspiciously, a “lyric video” was released on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, which Warner began promoting with ads, boosting its views. Would a major invest in a lyric video if a video were in the works?
The particular idea for ‘DANCETERIA’, a song in which Madonna recalls her beginnings with an unprecedented funk-rock setting, with several nods to ‘Music’ and one especially apt nod to Lou Reed, was sumptuous. We see Madonna recreating the hair-dryer scene from ‘Into the Groove’, dressed in a look from ‘Ray of Light’ but with a hairdo in full ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ mode. In other words, in a party mood, carrying a cassette of her first demo ‘Everybody’, ready to torment the trendy DJ with it, in a bathroom where there are no cameras or mobiles, yet there is cruising and oral sex in the booths, and “everyone here is a piece of art.” Even before Kate Moss’s cameos (“hide the cocaine”), Benedict Cumberbatch, her friend Debi Mazar, and the footballers previewing the World Cup interval, that line “everyone here is a piece of art” was iconic. It’s a pity that that part doesn’t make it into the short audio-visual piece.
But the original plan was not to make a video for this song in its entirety—not for any song—so that the short would tell more of the story as a whole. Madonna explained at Tribeca that the music video format struck her as obsolete, probably jaded by having splurged a fortune on the countless clips and singles from ‘Madame X’ (I counted up to 11 promotional tracks, in one way or another), most of which yielded a poor result on YouTube.
It isn’t a concern exclusive to Madonna. Taylor Swift’s ‘Opalite’ video has only 27 million streams on YouTube when the track surpasses 800 million on Spotify, and Olivia Rodrigo’s most recent videos—every one of them a hit—clock in at a disappointingly modest 20 to 50 million views. The days of reaching a billion views have faded even for BTS (145 million for ‘Swim’). YouTube’s audience has shifted to TikTok, Instagram, and even to the video-focused platforms that Spotify and Apple Music are promoting.
Madonna seemed to be onto something with this decision. Because of this strategy and others, she was No. 1 on the album charts in nearly 20 countries worldwide, across all major markets except Germany and Japan. Yet the release of the video for ‘Bring Your Love’ with Sabrina Carpenter—perceived by listeners as improvised and culminating in AI—has generated a great deal of confusion. It could be considered the sole misstep in a campaign otherwise excellent, which will be studied as a “rebranding” of a “legacy act,” and as a general launch, in a sense.
First, the result does not live up to the intention: aside from the added on-catwalk scene in which Madonna bursts out, it adds nothing. Its sound effects, pauses, and cuts undermine the mood. Second, it wastes Sabrina Carpenter, whose strongest suit is her fun and multi-faceted music videos. And third, more gravely, it has led people to believe there might be a video for the other songs in the short, especially for ‘DANCETERIA’, a track beloved by her fans that was applauded at the listening parties from the very first moment.
But the problem lies in the fragment of ‘DANCETERIA’ chosen for the short: it had a very particular structure, omitting the first pre-chorus and the chorus. In this way, it juxtaposed two verses that did not follow one another. Its script seems tailor-made for that short clip fragment. If Madonna had mentioned her friend Martin, the actor who plays Martin would appear. If she mentioned Debi Mazar, she would meet Debi Mazar. If she mentioned DJ Mark Kamins, the actor playing Mark Kamins would appear. Perhaps an easy fix—using outtakes, extras, captions, or something World Cup-related—could have produced a explosive ending for a song that rarely lacked power; but it seems no such ending was filmed. Yet if now, through editing, one were to insert anything into the missing pre-chorus and chorus between the two verses, the video would lose its narrative momentum and dynamism.
The numbers have vindicated Madonna’s initial idea: even with a notable Warner push, the video for ‘Bring Your Love’ has not surpassed 10 million views. It has not significantly boosted the song’s commercial lifecycle, nor has it enriched the artistic value. It simply exists. Fans are demanding a video be released, even if it risks worsening the public perception of ‘Danceteria’.
Madonna’s team has erred in this case because fans do not understand what is happening. At one point, they could have seeded to blogs like DrownedMadonna that there would be no video for ‘Danceteria’ (and it remains unclear what happened with a radio edit and a Seth Troxler remix listed in the ‘Afterhours’ remix variant). What the average user encounters are clips from the short that go viral on social networks, while no one seems sure where to go to finish watching. Millions more people watch fragments of ‘Danceteria’ on Instagram or TikTok than watch the full short, which struggles to reach 6 million views on YouTube.
In a surreal twist, we can already see the making-of for the video but not the video itself, not even the two-minute fragment on official channels. Let us hope that this article serves as a good luck charm to coax Madonna into giving us another one of the many zingers she has delivered in this era, though each day it feels a little too late.
