What's wrong with Mariah Carey?

Aug. 20--She's a multimillion-selling artist who's had trouble filling even modest concert halls. She has a rabid fan base, yet her biggest Hollywood movie became a box-office flop. And though she racked up eight Grammy nominations this year, she took home none of the major awards.

For such a hugely popular artist, Mariah Carey sometimes seems awfully unpopular.

The Greenlawn native boasts the bestselling album of 2005, "The Emancipation of Mimi" (Island), and she'll be playing to a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden Wednesday. But ticket sales have been somewhat soft for other shows on Carey's current tour, one of her biggest yet with an initial 31-date schedule. Already, she has canceled an additional date at the Garden plus three arena dates in Denver, Seattle and Hershey, Pa. As of last week, fans could still get lower-level seats at New Jersey's Continental Airlines Arena for Carey's Aug. 27 show. (Carey has added dates in Canada and at Jones Beach, and at least six shows have sold out according to Live Nation, the Los Angeles-based company handling the tour.)

Does this mean Carey's career is in trouble? Hardly. But it's a good example of how even the world's biggest pop stars must carefully navigate the choppy waters of the music industry. Since releasing her self-titled debut album in 1990, Carey, 36, has enjoyed envious success and embarrassing failures, at times almost simultaneously. Yet the singer with the glass-shattering voice and a prima donna reputation always manages to come out on top.

"She's known for demanding what she wants," says S. Tia Brown, associate editor at the celebrity magazine In Touch Weekly. "No one can argue that she hasn't matured into a smart businesswoman."

Carey's track record as a live act is only part of her overall picture. Generally, her tours have been infrequent -- one every few years -- and limited to a handful of dates in big cities. Carey played just five shows on her first tour, in 1993 (with "American Idol" host Randy Jackson on bass) and she didn't tour again until 1998, when she booked only four dates, according to the concert-industry publication Pollstar, based in Fresno, Calif.

By the time Carey embarked on a more ambitious 28-date tour in 2003, she had long neglected many of the country's "fly-over" cities. Initial plans for an arena tour, including stops at Madison Square Garden and Nassau Coliseum, were scrapped in favor of smaller, theater-sized venues. Even then, only 10 dates sold out, according to Pollstar. One show, at the 15,800-seat Woodlands pavilion near Houston, ended up less than half-full. And in Portland, Ore., Carey sold just 1,437 tickets at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall -- about 53 percent of capacity.

"She doesn't have the established audience of people who have seen her before and are anxious to see her again," Pollstar editor Gary Bongiovanni says. "You can play New York and Chicago over and over again and have a great following there. But whether that'll translate to other markets is another question."

There's also the question of what Carey brings to the stage. Though famous for her vocal acrobatics and sheer lung power, "she's not known for giving a particularly entertaining live show," says Brown of In Touch Weekly. "She's not a physical entertainer like Madonna or Janet Jackson. You're entertained by her voice."

Let's elaborate some more

Carey may be trying to change that. Her 2003 tour seemed geared toward the eyes as well as the ears, with plenty of costume changes, fanciful stage sets, faux paparazzi and a troupe of dancers. The current tour is being touted as the "most elaborate concert production of Mariah's career," according to a press release from Island. (The label declined to comment.)

Carey is facing a tough concert season, says Alex Hodges, executive vice president for House of Blues Concerts in Los Angeles. The summer tour business is down about 10 percent over last year, he notes, and Carey's sales may be affected by some of the big-name, high-priced tours that have already come though. "Madonna has taken a lot of the money out of the marketplace," he says.

She will survive

Still, Carey has survived far worse than slow ticket sales. In July 2001 she was hospitalized for "extreme exhaustion" after behaving oddly during public appearances (including one at the Roosevelt Field Mall, where she reportedly railed incoherently against Howard Stern). That same year, her semi-autobiographical film, "Glitter," performed so poorly at the box office -- it earned just more than $4 million -- that it became a punch line for late-night television hosts. Carey's label at the time, Virgin, soon took the remarkable step of paying her to leave, shelling out $28 million.

Carey's album sales began shrinking slightly. The 2002 disc "Charmbracelet" went platinum, but her earlier discs tended to go multiplatinum. That's likely because Carey was moving away from soft pop and toward a more R&B-inflected sound, says Geoff Mayfield, charts editor at Billboard magazine. It seemed like a misstep, but Carey might have been ahead of her time.

"In today's climate, R&B and hip-hop is extremely popular, and it's one of the primary ingredients you hear when you listen to Top 40 stations," Mayfield says. "That wasn't the case in the late '90s or the early part of this decade."

The success of "The Emancipation of Mimi" is partly because of its now-popular hip-hop flavor, with tracks featuring Snoop Dogg, Nelly and Jermaine Dupri. But Mayfield says the two-year gap between albums also helped.

"She kind of needed to go away and let the audience breathe, let herself breathe creatively," Mayfield says. "The best advice for trying to make a turnaround would be difficult for someone who's accustomed to being in the limelight, and that's: 'Go away.'"

Dampening Carey's comeback was her treatment at February's Grammys. She was nominated for eight and took home three, but they were lesser awards that weren't televised. The major prizes -- such as album, record and song of the year -- went to others. Carey lost best female pop vocal performance to Kelly Clarkson.

Was this another defeat for Carey? The week after the awards ceremony, "Mimi" jumped seven spots up the Billboard chart, from No. 14 to No. 7, and went on to sell 5.7 million copies. For anyone following Carey's turbulent career, it was further proof that her clouds always have a silver lining.

BY THE NUMBERS

How does Mariah Carey's career add up? Let us count the ways:

1990: Year Carey's self- titled debut was released on Columbia Records

1993: Year of Carey's wedding to Sony Music president Tommy Mottola

23: Her age at the time of the wedding

43: His age at the time

$80 million: Estimated worth of Carey's contract with Virgin Records in 2001

$28 million: Amount Virgin Records reportedly paid Carey to leave in 2002

$22 million: Production budget for Carey's movie "Glitter"

$4.2 million: Domestic ticket sales for "Glitter"

28: Dates on Carey's 2003 tour

10: Sold-out dates on that tour

1,841: Tickets sold at the 4,278-seat "Fabulous" Fox Theatre in St. Louis, the lowest turnout on that tour

3: Grammys Carey won in February

5.7 million: Copies sold of Carey's latest disc, "The Emancipation of Mimi"

1: That album's rank on 2005's best-selling list

Sources: Box officemojo.com, Pollstar, Nielsen SoundScan

WHEN & WHERE

Mariah Carey plays a sold-out show 8 p.m. Wednesday at Madison Square Garden; Sunday, Aug. 27, at Continental Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., tickets are $17.50-$150; and Sept. 3 at Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, tickets are $29.50-$157.50. Call Ticketmaster at 631-888-9000 or visit ticketmaster.com. Sean Paul opens all shows.

Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.

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