Memoirs of Mariah's experiment

About half a year ago, and with temperatures twice as high, a very exciting email arrived in my inbox (from a very exciting sender): Mariah Carey would release her new album in Autumn 2009, titled "Memoirs of An Imperfect Angel". Exciting part: her record label Island Def Jam Music Group had decided to incude a booklet, a mini Elle magazine all about the artist.
Considering the current poor state of the CD market, this seemed to me as quite a clever move to boost sales. I mean you can buy pirate copies and download as much as you like, but only the original copy would come with the special little mag. In days when the CDs come with newspapers, they thought of trying the exact opposite. Moreover, they'd include ads which would nicely support the release financially.

The fun and promising experiment would be out in 1 million copies to start with at the U.S. and 500,000 overseas. So how come I am bringing this up now? Before answering this, I'll let you check out some of the pages of the booklet, fished here.

Where was I? Ah, yes. The reason why I am bringing this up now, half a year later, is because somehow I bumped on that email again and was wondering whatever happened to that whole thing. For the come-back of such a popular idol and the mini-mag including ads from Elizabeth Arden, Angel Champagne, Carmen Steffens, Le Métier de Beauté and the Bahamas Board of Tourism, things have been TOO quiet.

And then I looked at the sales: 300,000 CDs out of that 1 million were sold in the U.S. by December 09 whereas London reported 67,347 pieces sold up until now, nowhere close to 500,000. My, oh my. It didn't go that well, did it? Were the songs that bad? Can we conclude that print fashion did not work well with music? Either-or, the company is dropping the promo of the album.
Oh well it was a good effort.