Billboard’s Ed Christman takes a look at Atlantic’s Kid Rock ploy—yanking his work off iTunes, in an attempt to force fans to buy the entire album.

(I can’t link to the story because I can’t find it on Billboard’s dreadful web site. Is it just me, or does anyone else find billboard.com and bilboard.biz entirely mystifying?)

Hitsville’s previous discussions of the issue are here (“The curious incident of the Kid Rock album that sold 1.7 million copies”) and here (“What happened after Atlantic yanked Estelle off iTunes?”).

Some of the industry response Christman gathered:

“Everybody is watching Kid Rock and what effect its unavailability at iTunes is having,” Universal Music Group Distribution president Jim Urie says. “We actually analyzed the Kid Rock situation and don’t see the benefit.”

A senior distribution executive at another major says, “I think they are going down the wrong path,” adding that, “yeah, it may jack up album sales, but then you are going back to the mentality of putting one good song on the album.”

Others say the debate of whether track sales cannibalize album sales is a giant step backward. “The consumer has spoken and they want tracks,” a major-label sales executive says.

Emphases added. Kid Rock is a special case, and may benefit a bit from this gambit. (Though it’s not clear that’s the case.) But what’s definitely true is that Atlantic is acting like it’s 1998, not 2008. Instead of trying to visualize a future in which label and artist can best take advantage of a digital world, it’s goin backward. The effects:

1) It drives music fans to illegal download sites.
2) It reinforces the image of the labels as out of tough and greedy
3) It undermines the moral argument against file-sharing.

1), of course, is the biggie. Christman talks to Big Champagne, which tracks illicit downloading:

[…D]ownloading patterns at unauthorized peer-to-peer networks suggest that Kid Rock’s experience with “All Summer Long” could prove difficult to replicate. During the week ended Aug. 26, the song was the 10th-most-downloaded track on P2P networks tracked by BigChampagne, with 1.05 million downloads recorded, up from 908,253 in the previous week.

Emphasis added. In the old days, a platinum single was a rare thing. Now, a pop song is being downloaded a million times a week, as the act and his label scheme how to rearrange the deck chairs on their sinking business model.

In an accompanying story Rock, his anti-downloading bravado heightened by the sales of the album, pontificates thusly:

“I remember being a kid when I heard a song that I liked, I would jump on the bus, ride to Detroit, get a $2.50 transfer and walk a mile to the hip-hop store to buy the new Eric B. & Rakim record. You’re not going to stop people from obtaining what they want if it’s available at some level.”

Given his rural fan base, he and his label have the luxury of this slightly lunatic apprehension of reality for now.

A lot of the the rest of the second story consists of Rock complaining that an Atlanta judge was being mean to him after he was convicted of assault after a ight at a Waffle House.

Ah, the Waffle House incident, where Rock was arrested in an early-morning October brawl outside of Atlanta and later sentenced to a year’s probation, fined $1,000 and ordered to undergo six hours of anger management counseling—for the second time […]—and perform 80 hours of community service.

Rock takes exception to the DeKalb County judge who ordered him to appear in court on the assault charges in the midst of his sold-out, four-day stand in Detroit. “I’m doing something positive, creating commerce for thousands and thousands of people, [and] this guy’s like, ‘You tell him to get his fucking ass down to Atlanta [on] Monday’—in between the shows,” he says. “I had already went to the Waffle House and raised $15,000. I took a bad thing and flipped it into something fun and positive and gave to a homeless shelter to help some homeless families. They didn’t care.

“Let’s not take this out of context. It was a good, old-fashioned fight at the Waffle House—no guns, no knives,” he adds. “But the judge sentenced me to 80 hours of community service; so by the way, while I’m doing this community service, I’ll never donate another dime to any charity in Atlanta, just because you’re a fucking asshole.”