Just when the new live-video-streaming app Meerkat gets blindsided by news that Twitter had brought arch-rival Periscope, thus threatening the former’s long-term survival, we learn from The Guardian’s blog that Madonna will be using the app to promote her new album.
Which goes to prove, once again, that Madonna has never met a virally-embraced social app she didn’t instantly fall in love with.
The Material Girl has squeezed a lot of hype juice out of these tools, including the use of Instagram, Snapchat and Grindr for the pub-campaign around her Rebel Heart album earlier this month.
“Be here at 10am PST tomorrow for the world premiere of Madonna’s Ghosttown video!” explained a message on , which at the time of writing has just under 1,000 subscribers.
With the announcement, Madonna once again has shown herself to be the queen of savvy when it comes to early adopting whatever tech tools people out there are picking up on.
Meerkat launched in February as the latest app enabling people to broadcast video live from their smartphones to their followers on Twitter. It has since been joined by Periscope, an app owned by that fulfils the same function.
Madonna is the biggest star yet to use Meerkat, after a bruising few weeks for the app, which saw Twitter turn off Meerkat’s access to its social graph, then saw it plummet down Apple’s App Store chart following Periscope’s release.
It remains to be seen how exactly Madonna will use Meerkat to debut a music video “as the app works by the broadcaster pointing their smartphone’s camera at whatever they want to stream.”
One possible option, The Guardian points out, would be to essentially stretch some of Meerkat’s functions:
If Madonna is able to air pre-recorded footage it will be an interesting departure for Meerkat. Allowing users to stream pre-recorded video would give it different functionality in its battle with Periscope.
Already this year, Madonna has by posting doctored photos of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, John Lennon and Bob Marley; ; and encouraging fans to post their own altered images of the album artwork.
Photo of Madonna from Associated Press archives
