Madonna
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Madonna during the Blond Ambition World Tour
establishment, Maverick Records became a major commercial success from her efforts, which was unusual at that time for an artist-established label. Guinness World Records names Madonna as the world's highest-earning female singer, after making £26.6 million in 2004 alone. Music journalist Robert Sandall said that while interviewing Madonna, it was clear that being "a cultural big hitter" was more important to her than pop music, a career she described as "an accident". He also saw a contrast between her anything-goes sexual public persona and a secretive and "paranoid" attitude toward her own finances; she fired her own brother when he charged her for an extra item. London Business School academics called her a "dynamic entrepreneur" worth copying; they identified her vision of success, her understanding of the music industry, her ability to recognize her
own performance limits (and thus bring in help), her willingness to work hard and her ability to adapt as the key to her commercial success. Conversely, reporter Michael McWilliams commented: "The gripes about Madonna—[she] conceals both bigotry and the essence of her art, which is among the warmest, the most humane, the most profoundly satisfying in all pop culture." Morton commented that "Madonna is oportunistic, manipulative and ruthless—somebody who won't stop until she gets what she wants—and that's something you can get at the expense of maybe losing your closed ones. But that hardly mattered to her." Taraborrelli felt that this ruthlessness was visible during the shooting of the Pepsi commercial in 1989. "The fact that she didn't want to hold a Pepsi can in the commercial, clued the Pepsi executives that Madonna the pop star and Madonna the businesswoman were not going to be dictated by somebody else, she will do everything in her way—the only way."
Discography
* Like a Virgin (1984)
* True Blue (1986)
* Like a Prayer (1989)
* Erotica (1992)
* Bedtime Stories (1994)
* Ray of Light (1998)
* Music (2000)
* American Life (2003)
* Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005)
* Hard Candy (2008)