The Observer reports, and Wired’s Listening Post blog picks up, a story that the the Rolling Stones will soon sign a 360 deal with Clear Channel Live Nation. As is typical in such stories, they are largely promotional, don’t examine the implications of the figures they are reporting, and are contradictory of other recent reportage.

From the Observer:

The Rolling Stones are on the verge of ending their 31-year relationship with EMI, dealing a blow to private equity owner Terra Firma, led by Guy Hands, which acquired the label in a £3.2bn deal last summer.

Sources say the group is close to clinching a deal with Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion firm, which would market its back catalogue, depriving EMI of around £3m a year. Live Nation, which last year poached Madonna from Warner, would also take highly profitable merchandising and touring rights for future Stones shows, some of which have grossed as much as £750m.

Note that the “31-year relationship” refers only to sales outside the U.S. Even by the lower standards of UK journalism, this is pretty silly. It’s unclear if the Stones will take its catalog with them; the NYT reported yesterday that “If the Stones left EMI, it would have little impact financially, because the company would still have the rights to the band’s catalog.” One of the two stories is 100 percent wrong. Also, the implication of the next sentence is that Live Nation is also taking the Stones’ touring business away from EMI, which is not true.

The Observer story says the band makes EMI three million pounds a year; Wired reports this as three million dollars a year. Fortunately, the Observer is a British news outlet, and not a Japanese one, so Wired is off only by a factor of two. Its hard to believe, however, even the Observer story is correct. If the Stones earn the company only the equivalent of $6 million (which is roughly what £3 million is) a year, that would mean (assuming, crudely, a $9 wholesale price and $3 per disc to the band) the band sells only perhaps a million CDs a year, total, around the world, which is less than I would have guessed. (I’d be happy to hear if any of those assumptions are significantly off.)

And, finally, Live Nation didn’t poach Madonna from Warner Brothers. Given her declining sales and the fact that no one yet knows if these 360 deals make financial sense, it may be just as accurate to say the company took her off Warner’s hands.

As for the Wired story, it says, “the Rolling Stones are the kings of the touring industry, with some tours grossing nearly three quarters of a billion dollars.” Only the Stones’ most recent tour, by far its biggest, grossed something over $500 million, over some three years.

It also says:

Live Nation,for its part, has already become a major force to be reckoned with. Its focus on all-encompassing, 360 degree deals means it only stands to benefit as touring threatens to unseat recording as the largest sector of the music business.

This breathless reportage is inappropriate. Live Nation, formerly Clear Channel, controls most of the U.S. concert business and has been “a force to be reckoned with” for more than a decade. It already makes a lot of money from acts like Madonna, the Stones and U2. The question, which again will only be answered as the music business continues to shake out, is whether there’s enough extra leverage to be squeezed out of the deals (i.e., some new creative ways to gouge some extra bucks out of sheeplike music fans) to make the high initial outlays worthwhile.

Since those artists make the vast part of their income from touring—and have been doing so for many decades in every case—they are not lambs coming to the benevolent concert industry for a piece of the action. Mick Jagger knows how much any Stones show will generate in ticket and mersh sales, and begins the negotiations assuming it’s all his.

The tensions this chancy strategy has evinced spilled over into the pages of the Wall Street Journal ($) last week:

Having laid out so much cash—an estimated $120 million for Madonna and $150 million for Jay-Z alone—Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino has sought to slow the pace of deal making so he can ascertain that deals already struck are working before entering new ones. But the company’s chairman, concert promoter Michael Cohl, wants to quickly strike deals with as many as 15 more artists.

According to people familiar with the matter, the dispute in recent weeks boiled over into a full-blown feud, with Mr. Cohl threatening to leave Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Live Nation.

All of these characters, by the way, deserve each other. Madonna and the Stones are artistically moribund, and U2 and Jay-Z are merely superior practitioners of the art of not looking that way. If Live Nation succeeds in harvesting even more big live acts for its stable, it truly will remake the industry; the company will be able to plan tours out years in advance, carefully doling out superstar roadshows to maximize box office, reduce scheduling conflicts, and avoid clustering too many big name acts on the road at any one time.

It will be accomplished by the simple expedient of taking actual artistic creation out of the equation altogether.