We must have missed the memo because we forgot to release our new album. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of “pop” artists who’ve seen a whole decade through, let alone more than two decades…

Madonna, Mariah Carey and Kylie Minogue are duking it out in a battle for attention and that increasingly rare (that is, paying) music consumer. This week we look at three of the music industry’s hottest (and oldest) divas.

With Britney Spears laying low to get her act together and Jessica Simpson happily jinxing football teams, the headlines are prime real estate for other, more mature pop stars these days.

Mariah Carey

Call us cynical, but the timing of her April 29 nuptials to Nick Cannon seems conspicuously opportunistic, seeing as how she’s in the thick of promoting a new album. You don’t think the whole thing is a publicity stunt, do you? I mean, the happy couple got tattoos and everything! That’s “soulmates”.

Carey has been showing off her new tattoo and basking in the media attention that followed her surprise wedding to Cannon last week, yet her new single, Bye Bye, has plummeted from #22 to #41 on the American singles chart. She also cancelled a May 15 concert in Dubai.

Her video for Touch My Body was pretty funny and Mariah’s still looking as hot as she did 20 years ago (which is, in a weird way, disturbing). The Emancipation of Mimi knew such success that its follow-up was bound to be something of a letdown (the jury’s still out, though). For Carey, there’s the consolation of knowing that she knocked Elvis out of the record books for #1 hit songs. If she can keep making good records and avoid dying, fat and drugged out of her mind while sitting on her toilet like the King did, it may be hard for anyone to unseat Carey in this category for a long, long time.

Look for Mariah the actress in the cast of the indie film Tennessee, performing as a waitress who travels with her two brothers to find their long-lost father. Let’s hope for the sake of her (and our) mental health that this isn’t another Glitter.

Madonna

There’s something a little creepy about watching Madge frolic on the screen with Justin Timberlake in the video for 4 Minutes, considering that she’s old enough to be his mother. Yes, she was born in 1958! That makes her, um, let’s not go there.

Still, the song is (very) high rotation and her second single, Give It 2 Me, debuted at #21. The album Hard Candy sold almost triple what Mariah’s E=MC2 debuted to in Canada a few weeks ago.

She’ll kick off her Sticky & Sweet tour in Cardiff, Wales on August 26 and begin her North American tour in Rutherford, N.J. on October 3rd. Let’s hope her new stuff stays hot for that long.

Hard Candy was first released in Australia on April 26 and streamed on Myspace four days before the US release. It has debuted at #1 in 27 countries. Carey might have beaten Elvis’s record but Hard Candy is Madge’s 7th #1 album, making her the female artist with the second-most #1 albums, behind Barbra Streisand.

Ms. Ciccone-Ritchie has come a long way since she writhed on stage in a bustier slash wedding gown at the first (yes, the first) MTV Video Music Awards performing Like A Virgin.

Kylie Minogue

The singer who inspired the legendary Michael Hutchence to pen Suicide Blonde, who bounced back from breast cancer with unprecedented zeal, and whose latest accessory is dubbed the ‘botox’ bag, has kicked off her new world tour in Paris last week to rave reviews.

One reviewer wrote, “Aussie pop royalty Kylie kicked off her X2008 tour with her most opulent concert ever. The brave star, who has firmly set her cancer battle behind her, proved she is the undisputed queen of the pop landscape with this intoxicating set. An impressive band, including a brass section for the first time ever, excelled, but it was the theatricality that impressed most. A Kylie show is no mere concert, it’s an epic theatrical extravaganza. And one that should not be missed.”

It was reported that tickets for the UK event for all the eight shows scheduled sold out in just 30 minutes after opening.

She’s come a long way baby, from the wedding of the century as Charlene on the hit Australian soap, Neighbours, to the woman who is now dubbed Australia’s most successful export.

Her first hit, in July 1987, a remake of the 1962 Little Eva hit Locomotion because the biggest single of the 80s. Twenty years later she now holds the record for the most played female artist on UK radio over the last 20 years!

The Singing Budgie (as she’s affectionately known back home) has to date released ten studio albums, two live CDs, seven live concert DVD’s, plus her Greatest Hits and the Ultimate Kylie double album and multiple video packages. This is, of course, in addition to 43 singles released internationally, all of which have been hits.

She released X, her 10th studio album and her first in four years, in November 2007. X was released in April 2008 in the US but deemed a commercial failure. Minogue blamed the “notoriously difficult” US market. Interestingly though, this does not affect her ticket sales in the slightest.

On the Web:

http://www.mariahcarey.com/splash.html

http://www.madonna.com/

http://www.kylie.com/home