That Madsen is a nice looking rifle (very few rifles are not, if they're in good shape). Is that butt pad what it came with? It's probably not as soft as it looks.
The Madsen company was very early in producing light machine guns and they were widely distributed. After WWII, they also produced an advanced general-purpose machine gun but apparently did not manage to achieve much in the way of significant sales. Their bolt action was also a little late in the game but according to their advertising, they would produce them in just about any rimless cartridge.
The late 1940s and early 1950s were not a boom time for arms makers, as the first ten years after a war usually turn out to be. The M1 was widely distributed along with other American small arms and left over German weapons were also being collected and sold in the world arms market. Even then, new bolt action rifles were still being manufactured in some places, though not of new designs. The newly obsolete Mosin-Nagant rifles were being passed on to their Eastern friends in China, Korea and Southeast Asia. The SKS appeared soon after the war only to be replaced not long after by the AK series, so most of those went into storage for a while. They'll probably show up here someday.