First off, will we ever get to call him Sean “Puffy” Combs ever again?

This coming Tuesday, all girl pop group Danity Kane releases their sophomore album Welcome To The Doll House. It seems like just yesterday when Puffy, I mean Diddy, put the group together through the MTV show, Making The Band. When he whittled down the hopefuls, the result was Shannon, Aundrea, Aubrey, Dawn, and D. Woods. Having many weeks of television is a great marketing opportunity, as millions of people were able to watch the girls blend into a mature girl group. Also, Diddy and company utilized MySpace as a marketing tool better than any professional that I’ve ever seen. As a result, the girls sold over 200,000 units during the first week of release and eventually went platinum.

Puff Daddy, I mean Diddy, is trying to strike while the iron is hot. Trying to duplicate his success with Danity Kane, Diddy put together an all male R&B group, called Day26, during the fourth iteration of Making The Band. The show was just as much boot camp as it was singing competition, but it worked, and when the latest version of the show featured Danity Kane, Day26, and solo artist Donnie J. all fighting for studio time, my thought was that Diddy done did it again. However, the music landscape has changed even more so than when Danity Kane’s first album was released. MySpace was still the hottest website around.

If you’ve watched the season, the girls are desperately trying hard to match the success of the first album. The guys are just trying to find their place. Donnie J., who is sort of a mix between Jordan Knight and Justin Timberlake, is simply trying to not get lost in the shuffle.

The good news is, Day26 looks to have the chops to be a real R&B group. Danity Kane needs a hot single to hit, but I can’t imagine their new album will be that much different from what worked last time. And at this point, who really knows about Donnie J., as we haven’t seen a release date for him yet? But you have to give Diddy props for being one of the hardest working executives in the game. Traditional music marketing isn’t necessarily working as well as it did in the past, and he’s taking chances and being creative in selling his artists. It’s worked once, and we’ll see if it can work three more times.

Day26’s album drops March 25, 2008 and you can listen to Danity Kane’s new album, Welcome To The Doll House on MTV’s The Leak.