A couple of years ago I noticed Lenny Kravitz turning up a lot in stories about… real estate, like this one about a Manhattan townhouse once owned by Doris Duke, on sale for $50 million:

Lenny Kravitz, the rock star and budding designer, has visited the house twice, said Mamdouh Nasr, the owner of an ice cream truck that has parked for 28 years on the corner of 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue, just steps from the mansion’s front door.

To Mr. Nasr, it’s clear evidence that the musician, who enjoys buying and fixing up real estate, is buying the home. “To this guy time is money,” Mr. Nasr said. “So why he comes inside two times?”

He was also in another Times story, in the Style section, about a $38 million piece of real estate in Miami. Neither story remarked upon it, but I wondered, Where does Lenny Kravitz come up with that sort of money?

In the new Billboard, there’s a cover story about how Kravitz and Virgin are trying to repair a supposedly frayed relationship. Why that relationship frayed is skirted in the story, but it can be plainly seen in an accompanying chart, which details how Kravitz’s album sales, which topped out at 3M for “5″ and then 4.5M for a greatest hits set, have been in the toilet since then.

The answer, of course, is touring. Kravitz has had a respectable sales career; he’s plainly in that top 5 percent of artists who have actually made serious money from CD sales. But you could take all his sales royalties and put them in a box and they would be barely enough to make a down payment on a couple of homes like that. I see that Kravitz is a designer now, and has been flipping real estate for some time, so he’s obviously made some money doing that. But as the record industry continues to complain about file-sharing, this is a good example of where the real money is.

Artists like Kravitz, and coevals like Bon Jovi, are in their way footnotes to the 90s music scene. They each sold a lot of records, but they were never critical favorites and left little in the way of an artistic footprint. But as their fans grew older their incomes grew bigger as well, and today it is not unusual for artists whose time had seemingly come and gone to make tens of millions of dollars in just a few months on the road.

While acts like Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones have long been record-setters when it comes to tour income, in the last decade or two many others have been getting into the mix. The Eagles pioneered this phenomenon in the early 1990s, when the band’s long-awaited first reunion tour boasted a then-groundbreaking $120 a ticket. As ticket prices have increased, tour grosses have gone up too. An average ticket price of $100 leveraged against a mid-sized basketball arena can suddenly produce multi-million-dollar nightly grosses—and that’s before additional sales from merchandise.

On the top level—marquee acts like Simon and Garfunkel and of course the Stones—breathtaking amounts of money can be had. Case in point: The Stones’ two-night stand at that baseball park in downtown San Francisco (the one whose name keeps changing to one or another phone company): 44,000 fans a night paid an average of more than $250 each to see the band, producing a heady $11.2 million gross for the shows.

But, again, here’s the much lesser Bon Jovi at the new Prudential Center in Newark—ten shows with an average $1.6 million a night. For them, and other nostalgia acts on the road like Van Halen, the magic $100-a-seat number produces one- and two-million-dollar paydays, night after night after night.