Yesterday (“Getting the Stones story wrong”) we saw transcontinental confusion, from London (The Observer) to San Fransisco (Wired News) about rumors that had the Rolling Stones working on a 360 deal with Live Nation.

Today, Reuters has a story saying the Stones are denying the reports. Well, sort of:

“We are not in talks with Live Nation in connection with any record deal,” London-based Rolling Stones spokesman Bernard Doherty said on Monday, reading from a brief statement.

If the denial is to be believed, the Observer was talking through its hat. The story included this assertion: “It is understood that Universal will have a role, with Live Nation licensing new versions of the [Stones’] catalogue to the American label, which would sell them online and as CDs.”

Whether the comment was designed to smooth ruffled feathers at EMI or just to keep attention focused on the band isn’t clear. A touring deal between the Stones and Live Nation will at once be more and less significant than Madonna’s or Jay-Z’s. It certainly won’t be a long-term set-up; Mick Jagger is 65, fifteen years older than Madonna, and sooner or later exhaustion or, sad to say, death is going to catch up with the band.

On the other hand, the Stones’ tour grosses are in a class by themselves; if Live Nation signed the band tomorrow just for touring (not even merchandise) and gave the group an advance equal to the gross of its last tour, that figure ($550 million) would be bigger than that of the Madonna and Jay-Z deals combined.

Meanwhile, Wired corrects itself for a mistake it didn’t make. Originally it repeated the Observer, which said the Stones had been with EMI for 31 years; Wired now says the band had only been with EMI since the conglomerate bought Virgin. But this is true only for U.S. releases; the group did have EMI distribute Rolling Stones Records for the rest of the world since the late 1970s. (My source is Old Gods Almost Dead.)

Wired doesn’t correct its figure for the group’s last tour grosses (”nearly three quarters of a billion dollars”) and displays its unfamiliarity with the concert-ticketing industry as well:

When the company’s contract with TicketMaster runs out next year, it will hopefully bring more competition to the online ticketing market, though we’re not holding our breath.

The company isn’t going to compete with Ticketmaster; it’s going to take the exorbitant and unnecessary fees the company collected for itself!