The Wall St. Journal has a case study of Kid Rock’s latest album, Rock ‘n’ Roll Jesus; the paper says that, because Rock wouldn’t allow the thing to be sold on iTunes, it has sold 1.7 million copies–and that this was leading his record company, Atlantic, to contemplate yanking the work of other artists, too, from the service.

This year, Kid Rock, whose real name is Bob Ritchie, has had a massive radio hit with “All Summer Long” — a nostalgia-soaked rocker built on riffs sampled from two of the most iconic songs in classic rock: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.”

Mr. Levitan, his manager, points out that if his client’s album were sold the way iTunes wants, many of his 1.6 million U.S. album sales to date would instead have shown up as 99-cent downloads of “All Summer Long.”

When I first read the article Mr. Levitan’s contention jumped out at me, and I began to ponder his words. I absent-mindedly torrented the album and mentally committed to spend all the time it took to get it trying to figure out the implications of his scheme or plan.

Here’s what I came up with:

1) Well, yeah. If you can’t get a certain product in one of the venues from which you’d expect to, sales will go up in the venues remaining.

2) But since each new release from an artist sells differently, you can’t really tell exactly how much effect such a change would have.

3) Indeed, 1.7 million is pretty low for Rock–he used to sell ten million plus.

4) What’s really going on here is that the music industry is playing another round of whack-a-mole with the singles format. The industry did away with it ten or twelve years ago for just this reason–why give kids an opportunity to buy a song for 99 cents when you can present them with the sole option of shelling out $13.99 to buy the song on a nice new shiny CD, along with eight or nine other songs they might not want?

5) This was one of the resentments of the industry that has fueled the file-sharing networks. (”Sure, it’s wrong, but the record companies do worse every day.”)

6) Since, in stark contrast to ten or twelve years ago, file-sharing now exists, the industry’s math isn’t quite the same. Let’s say back then the industry needed to con persuade only seven or eight percent of the fans of a given song to part with the higher CD price to break even on the deal. Today they have to do that minus the number who will just get a friend to email or swap them the song they really want. The number remaining represents a very small and very unsophisticated part of the audience–meaning that additional full CD sales would be minimal.  (To be fair, you could also add on those with enough disposable income who would ordinarily just buy the song on iTunes but would then shrug and purchase the whole album when they find they couldn’t.)

7) But that just reminds us that Rock is something of a special case in any event. “All Summer Long” can’t be found on Elbo.ws, suggesting either that Rock has an extremely aggressive campaign to keep his music off the MP3 blogs, or that the Kid Rock fan base and computer-savvy music fans don’t as yet overlap significantly. The song itself is pretty sad, with Rock chanting some singsongy nostalgic drivel over those riffs the WSJ story mentions. The crude construction of the song and the dates of those samples capture the demographics of his fan base pretty clearly.

Whoops! My torrent’s finished.