On Nikki Finke’s blog, history changes as fast as she can rewrite it.

When we last checked in with Finke (“Crazy Nikki vs. the journalist”), she was haranguing LAT columnist Patrick Goldstein and Summit Entertainment production capo Eric Feig for saying, correctly, that Juan Antonio Bayona, the Spanish director, had not been hired to direct the third installment of the Twilight franchise.

Finke began the discussion, by reporting, incorrectly, that Boyona had been selected by Summit to direct the movie.

Variety picked up the story and so did a lot of other blogs. Goldstein, a wet blanket if ever there was one, actually interviewed Feig about it. The exec said it wasn’t true.

Goldstein did a lot more reporting to make sure it wasn’t, and did a post-mortem on how the story had gotten out, focusing on Finke.

In response, Finke went characteristically ballistic in characteristically imaginative fashion. First she said that she hadn’t actually reported that Bayona was the pick; she quoted herself saying, “I can confirm that Summit Entertainment is telling Hollywood privately that Juan Antonio Bayona will direct Eclipse.”

That’s not much of a defense, of course. She wasn’t saying that they liked Bayona; she was saying that he “would direct” the movie.

And then there was the hedline for the post, which was “Summit Picks Bayona To Direct Twilight Threequel ‘Eclipse’.”

Feig told the LAT that Finke hadn’t called the studio for comment; his exact words were, “Nikki never called Summit or any of the producers.”

Finke turned that into this curiosity, emphasis added:

Summit Entertainment’s president of worldwide production and acquisitions Erik Feig is accusing Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein of misquoting him today about the accuracy of my reporting. And the movie executive has apologized to me. Feig also confirms that there’s no policy at his studio demanding that journalists must contact him, and only him, whenever they write about Summit films.

After that ringing lede, Finke

….. didn’t explain what Feig had said Goldstein misquoted him on;

…. didn’t explain what Feig had apologized to her for; and

…. never cited a source for Feig’s (nonexistent) him-and-only-him dictat.

Fast forward to today, when Finke just posted this item:

TOLDJA! David Slade To Direct ‘Eclipse’

“Toldja!” !?

In the copy Finke now says that Feig “offered” the film to Bayona, a bit of information she hadn’t shared with readers before. Finke has lots of (sometimes) good sources; a few days ago she’s promised some new bit of Twilight info, and this may have been it.

Her problem is that she’s incapable of admitting she’s wrong, and it drives her to extreme behaviors.

Her item on Slade doesn’t mention her earlier, inaccurate posts, and when I read it, I was confused; I had remembered her saying Bayona had gotten the job already. I went back to the original post, to read this:

I can confirm that Summit Entertainment is telling Hollywood privately that Juan Antonio Bayona will direct Eclipse. I’m not saying he’s been offered the job or hired, which in Hollywood involves deal memos, signed contracts, and the like. Just that the studio execs Wednesday night passed the word he’s their guy. It’s a very out-of-the-box choice for the 3rd movie in the “Twilight Saga” series of Stephenie Meyer vampire novels being hurried to the big screen by the start-up studio.

Now I was even more confused.

I didn’t remember that second sentence:  “I’m not saying he’s been offered the job or hired, which in Hollywood involves deal memos, signed contracts, and the like.”

If Finke had written the item like that originally, why would Goldstein have pointed to it as being incorrect? It didn’t take me long to find a few people who had quoted Finke’s original posting, which ran as follows:

I can confirm that Summit Entertainment is telling Hollywood privately that Juan Antonio Bayona will direct Eclipse. It’s a very out-of-the-box choice for the 3rd movie in the “Twilight Saga” series of Stephenie Meyer vampire novels being hurried to the big screen by the start-up studio. (I guess it doesn’t matter that other sources tell me Bayona hasn’t yet met Stephenie, huh?)

The rest of it hadn’t changed.

In other words, Finke got a big item wrong; went postal on another journalist who called her on it; made up a lot of wacky stuff; went back to change her original item to make herself look better without telling readers …

… and then, just to complete the pentathlon of bad journalistc practices she was engaged in, patted herself on the back for a scoop on a bit of information she got wrong originally.

There’s been a lot of writing about Nikki Finke lately, but none of it has captured her biggest weakness and the one that may, some day, wreck her career: Crazy shit like this.

Jerry Del Colliano, the publisher of Home Theater Review, writing on the prospects of Blu-ray audio:

Computer software companies and Hollywood studios make their vast fortunes selling the same basic data over and over again, each time with new twists and performance enhancements. The major record labels used to follow same business model until the mid-1990s. As much as the major labels want to blame Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing for their ills, that’s not the issue. The issue is that the compact disc isn’t an HD format and consumers want everything HD today. Blu-ray is HD on all levels. Blu-ray is good for surround sound in HD resolutions, it’s copy-protected and it’s cheap to get started. It’s a stunning value proposition for audiophiles, as well as for consumers far more mainstream in the marketplace today.

Emphasis added. Del Colliano is writing to audiophile labels, which is why he’s stressing the copy-protection, which is obviously not a consumer attraction. But there is half of a clever point here.

The appeal? The chance to hear the master tape of, say, Abbey Road in your living room—an actual perfect copy of it.

If only we had the equipment in those living rooms to hear it the way it was meant to. That’s the beauty of his point: In any house with either a Blu-ray player or a PS3, with an accompanying decent home theater speaker system—and that’s an massively expanding demographic—there’s a potential convert to Blu-ray audio.

Blu-ray audio isn’t going to replace a generation’s infatuation with MP3s, and the music industry is never going to see the CD gravy train again. But we are long overdue for an audiophile revival.

The one I’ve been expecting is a conversion of the old terrestrial pattern to the online music-selling realm. It hasn’t happened yet, but at some point, as iPod storage capacity grows, iTunes is going to tell us that our MP3s have crummy sound, and that we should rebuy our music in some lossless format.

Del Colliano is onto another tack: The economy’s going to turn around at some point, and again, ever-more aging baby boomers and, soon, Gen-Xers, will start to make a little too much money and get a little too bored.

The prospect of, for the boomers, buying one last copy of Sgt. Pepper or Electric Ladyland or Hotel California and just sticking it into their Blu-ray player or their kid’s PS3 (i.e., without having to buy a new piece of hardware) may be hard to resist.

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

A lossless backlash, already?
T-Bone Burnett on the drawbacks of digital sound
More dispatches from the Going to Hell in a Handbasket dept. 
Going to Hell in a Handbasket dept.
Sell it again, Sam

Val Kilmer’s been in about three big movies (The Doors, Willow, and Batman Forever) and failed in an attempt at his own superhero franchise (The Saint).

What do you think his net worth is?

The Journal today ($) has a squib about Kilmer’s sticking his New Mexico ranch up for sale. (Recap from the NM Independent here.)

Asking price? $30 million.

Kilmer seems to call New Mexico home; he’s even been considering a run for the governorship. So maybe he’s sunk all of his earnings over the past twenty years into it. Still, based on his oeuvre, you wouldn’t think he’d have assets like that.

Like Lenny Kravitz, he’s a reminder that even second-tier stars are making enormous amounts of money.

The Daily Swarm links to this Guardian story, which takes a look at the internet radio service called Jango:

Payola – the illegal practice of paying or in any other way bribing a radio station to play your song – has existed since the advent of pop music. In the 1960s, Alan Freed was the first person convicted of payola and the book Hit Men described in detail how the practice was rife in the 70s and 80s. When the US government clamped down on it, record companies (and the radio stations benefiting from payola) got around the problem by paying “independent promoters” who would do the dirty work for them. But as recently as 2005-06, three of the major labels were indicted and settled out of court for pay-for-play practices.
[…]
Now webcaster Jango has come up with an ingenious way of legitimising these bribes, by declaring publicly that they’ve been paid to play songs. For as little as $30, a band can buy 1,000 plays on the music-streaming service, slotted in between established artists (who don’t pay for their slots, I assume). The artists themselves choose what other music they’d like to be played next to.

Like too many people who write about payola, the writer, Helienne Lindvall, doesn’t … understand what payola is. There’s no law against paying someone to play your songs on the internet, and Jango isn’t doing anything “ingenious.”

There is a law that says US broadcasters have to disclose payments for airplay, along with some other requirements. The broadcasters are using public airwaves, of course, and under statute at least are supposed to be operating in the public interest. Ha.

On the internet, who cares? Let the listener beware.

From the NYT a couple of weeks ago:

The cutoff date for eligibility for next year’s Grammy Awards will be shortened by a month because the 52nd annual awards ceremony will be held a bit earlier than usual, the Grammy organizers announced on Thursday. The 2010 ceremony will be on Jan. 31; this year the Grammys were presented on Feb. 8. The eligibility cutoff date for the 2010 awards will be Aug. 31.

One of the many crazy things about the Grammys is its curious eligibility window, generally from October to September.

This creates two problems: One, since so many important, by Grammy standards, CDs are released late in the year, it creates a disconnect between the CDs everyone’s talking about (not to mention the CDs that, say, critics pick in their end of year lists, based on the old-fashioned concept of the “calendar year”) and Grammy nominees.

Second, it allows Grammy-friendly artists and labels to game the system, by releasing advance singles just under the eligibility wire, allowing them to get to play the Grammy marketing game over two ceremonies. (Last year, remember, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant took album-of-the-year honors for a CD that contained a song the pair had won a Grammy for the previous year.)

This creates another of the Grammy oddities. The organization should force labels to pick their year for eligibility for a particular CD and the songs on it.

And so this year … the group moves the period back a month! (Because its show has been moved back a week.) Makes perfect sense.

The American Antitrust Institute has just published an anaysis of the merger. It’s not positive:

The discussion considers two other attributes of the proposed transaction that make it even more problematic.  First, one of the chief concerns raised by the merger is that Live Nation Entertainment would be a vertically integrated enterprise with dominance or substantial power on six market levels.  The new entity would therefore be able to use its strengths in some markets as leverage to gain customers or compliance in others.  Moreover, this vertical integration would effectively frustrate new entry, because as a practical matter it would require firms seeking to compete seriously against Live Nation Entertainment to enter the industry on several levels at once.  The second factor is that the merged entity would likely enjoy market power not just as a seller but also as a buyer.  In essence, the company’s market dominance would benefit it in both ways.

The paper also considers whether the merger, suspect on its surface, might yield efficiencies that warrant not challenging the transaction.  In this regard, the Department of Justice may consider only efficiencies that (a) arise specifically from the merger and would not be attainable in other reasonable way, (b) are not speculative and whose benefits are
verifiable, and (c) outweigh the harm caused in every adversely affected market.  The efficiencies claimed by the parties satisfy none of these requirements.

Emphases added. The whole paper is available here.

___________

Previously in Hitsville:

A new Ticketmaster Phish screwup
An economist on scalping
Live Nation’s NYC parking fee three-card monte
Ticketmaster’s definition of the word ’scalping’
Bono, noted Live Nation employee, ducks merger questions from DeRo!
The Corgan meltdown—It gets worse
Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and the ’secondary market’
The best article yet on the Ticketmaster/Live Nation debate
Hillary Rosen—She’s baaaack!
Ticketmaster service fees: Where the money goes
Live-blogging the House hearings on the Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger
“Re”-selling tickets that don’t yet exist
Liveblogging the Senate’s Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger hearings
Seal & Van Halen in Azoff’s corner!
Updated! 26 questions that should be asked at the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger hearings tomorrow Ticketmaster shareholders sue to stop merger
How Live Nation does business
Will the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger mean higher concert prices?
Another suit against Ticketmaster
Constantly updated: The Ticketmaster-Live-Nation unholy-matrimony news round-up!
Five arguments against the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger
Irving Azoff kicks it old school
The music industry’s Putin
Bad merger coverage
WWBD (What would Bono do?)
Billboard’s analysis of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger
Springsteen and Landau bash Ticketmaster and Live Nation!
P.S. on Ticketmaster: A case study, starring Bruce Springsteen
Why the potential Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is a very bad idea
Is Ticketmaster trying to muddle the fees issue?
The Azoff-Ticketmaster deal: Bad news for concert-goers—and the music industry
Why you so seldom read about obscene Ticketmaster-style ticketing charges

The RIAA and MPAA have not been coy about suggesting that what the U.S. needs is a “three strikes” law like the one under consideration in France, under which serial illegal downloaders, say, would lose their internet access after a series of warnings.

Hitsville favors this approach if the principle is extended to other aspects of the debate.

If Mitch Bainwol, the head of the RIAA, lies three times to reporters via email, he loses his internet access. If he lies three times on the phone, the RIAA has its phone lines cut off.

If the RIAA files three frivolous lawsuits, it loses access to the courts.

If Warner Bros. is found to have not paid three artists their royalties, it is prohibited from selling CDs. If Sony records is found to have paid off three radio stations to play songs by its artists, in violation of federal payola laws, it loses all access to terrestrial radio.

Am I on to something?

This AP story doesn’t make the case. A few $20 tickets at a Keith Urban show doesn’t mean anything, and cheap seats in the back have been around for a long time.

The story cheerfully parrots the Ticketmaster-Live Nation line: That cheaper concert tix are on the way! As for the artists, they don’t want to make money either:

“It’s a balance for me,” Urban added, “because we want to put on a good show. I’d make every ticket $10, but we’d be up there with a megaphone and a flashlight with some colored paper over it.”

Sure he would. The AP writer, John Gerome, incredibly, doesn’t even mention the impending merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, in which the entities most responsible for rising ticket prices are actually joining forces.

Why confuse readers with all that annoying context, when it’s easier to quote Live Nation execs about all the fabulous things they are doing for music fans?

I didn’t know this, incidentally:

[A]lt-country star Lucinda Williams, also worried about the economy and miffed about fees tacked on to her concert tickets, is offering a credit on concert merchandise, about $7 on clothing and $5 on CDs, and on merchandise on her online store, lucindawilliams.com. The offer is through July 31 to accommodate people who attended her shows before the announcement.

“I understand that this may only be a small gesture and in no way solves the problem long-term, but I feel that it is important to try and do something to make it a little easier during this time,” she said in a statement.

I’ll insert the full statement at the end of this post. You can also read it here.

The economics of her offer are sad, illustrating the craziness of the concert industry. Since Ticketmaster and Live Nation have the ticketing industry sewn up, you have to believe her when she says she doesn’t have control over ticket fees.

She could try an independent touring route, but that’s a lot of work to make a point. I assume she makes a decent living, but she’s also one of those artists whose succès d’estime livelihood isn’t necessarily a permanent one.

Anyway, if you use her discount at a show, you’re paying show prices—marked up prices, that is, because the venues (and, I’m sure in some cases, the promoters) take a cut of the merchandise sales. It would be interesting to hear whether the discount Williams is offering is shared by the venues or just taken out of her side of the profits.

In any case, it’s probably more beneficial for both consumer and artist to use the discount on her site.

Her complete statement:

LUCINDA WILLIAMS OFFERS RELIEF TO FANS FROM HIGH TICKET FEES DURING TIGHT ECONOMIC TIMES

Nashville, TN Three-time Grammy Award-winner Lucinda Williams knows how tough it is out there during the current economic climate. She also knows that the fees attached to her concert tickets (and most others) are making things even tougher for fans. Since Williams cannot control these fees, she wanted to do something to offer some kind of relief to her fans.

“I cannot, in good conscience, sit back and watch my fans get blatantly gouged.” says Williams. “As an attempt to offset these fees, we are going to offer a standing credit at our merchandise table to everyone attending our upcoming US shows in 2009.”

Each fan who attends a Lucinda Williams show in 2009 will receive a credit on merchandise sold at the concerts. The credit will be applied at the merchandise table at each venue. The discount will be approximately $7 on clothing and $5 on CDs. This credit will also be extended to her online store at lucindawilliams.com from April 1 to July 31 to accommodate those who may have attended shows prior to this announcement.

Williams adds, “I understand that this may only be a small gesture and in no way solves the problem long term, but I feel that it is important to try and do something to make it a little easier during this time.”

Bono’s business dabblings are getting weirder and weirder. Sure there’s been rock stars who’ve made some heady business deals, but in the end it tended to be be about just taking in the stupid money shoved at them.

In 2004, Bono and Co. debuted the U2-themed iPod under a “special partnership” with Apple. But then earlier this year the group announced that Blackberry—the iPhone’s only real competitor—would be the sponsor of their upcoming tour.

The marketing efficacy of tour sponsorships to me seems debatable, but this may be a special case. Rim, which makes the Blackberry, got a priceless boost with Barack Obama’s refusal to give his Blackberry up when he became president.

Say what you like about Bono, he’s one of the few people in the world on Obama’s level when it comes to celebrity, intelligence, and cool; the U2 alliance is a potent reinforcement of the image of the Blackberry’s users Rim wants to project.

Now, Marketwatch’s Terese Poletti makes an interesting point: Bono is a major player in an investment partnership called Elevation … which is a big investor in not Apple, not RIM, but Palm, who existence probably will rest on the reception its new Pre gets later this year.

Some background:

Roger McNamee, an Elevation co-founder and one of Palm’s directors, is well known in Silicon Valley for his investment success and his passion for rock music. McNamee started Elevation in 2005 with five other investors, and was a co-founder of Silver Lake — a private-equity firm that fared extremely well in the Seagate Technology  leveraged buyout.

McNamee himself plays the guitar in a rock band called Moonalice; he is a huge Grateful Dead fan. In recent months, he’s taken a drubbing in the press for his increasingly long hair. But he got more attention a few weeks ago, after Palm officially retracted some of McNamee’s bullish statements about the prospects for the Pre.

Elevation invests in content, entertainment and consumer-related firms. In 2006, it became a minority shareholder in newly formed Forbes Media LLC, publisher of Forbes magazine.

Last December, the firm made another $100 million investment in the struggling Palm.

As a founder of Elevation, Bono must hope that Palm will fare well. The name of the private-equity firm even comes in part from the U2 song of the same name, which is on the band’s 2001 album, “All That You Can’t Leave Behind.”

This has got to be the sort of thing that probably drives Bono’s Elevation partners crazy. His investment in the firm is play money, to him; the company didn’t care originally, because he was worth a lot more to them in hip bona fides and press attention.

Going up against Apple was challenge enough; now Palm has a revivified Rim to worry about, and Bono’s not helping. They’re seeing the downside of having a rock star in the sand box.

The iTunes Store went live with its new increased prices this week. Most coverage, NYT and LAT included, led with the fair and balanced news that the store was raising the price of many hit singles to $1.29 and lowering more obscure tracks to 79 cents.

In reality, since the $1.29 price will be for the most popular songs, the ratio in terms of sheer number of sales will be highly skewed to the new high price, and should in the short term significantly increase the income at the store.

That’s what all the talk about more “flexibility” in the prices was all about: Selling things for more money.

In classic record industry fashion, this does indeed look good in the short term, but not in the long term.

Why?

The downside for the labels is that the price hike came only after they agreed to remove the DRM from the iTunes.

Did Jobs get the best of the labels yet again?

Imagine two teens buying music. They are used to buying songs for 99 cents. They notice the price is higher … but the restrictions on just emailing a downloaded song to a friend has been removed.

Aren’t the labels giving them a rationale to buy the track once and send it around to their friends? And as the learning curve for that rises, won’t the rate of sales for the higher-priced songs start dropping?

“Oh, Madison, we shouldn’t—file-sharing is illegal! It’s stealing!”

“Oh Barlow, don’t be silly. They just jacked up the prices! And besides, they specifically changed it so we can just email songs. They want us to!”

There will be a learning curve, of course, but how long is it going to take 14-year-olds to get into the habit to emailing any song they buy to a half-dozen friends?

There’s the long-awaited announcement this a.m. that the Beatles will release remastered versions of their original UK releases, with Magical Mystery Tour and the Past Masters CDs included to complete the 1960s canon.

Complete release is inserted below. The releases, and a pair of accompanying box sets, will come out in September. The statement from EMI concluded:

Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue.  There is no further information available at this time.

The announcement demonstrates decisively that that the label, the surviving band members, and the estates of Lennon and Harrison think there’s a lot more money to be made with shiny discs than digital ephemera.

It also shows how silly so much of the speculation about the availability of the catalog on iTunes has been.

(Last year, for example, the Daily News in England said that Paul McCartney had “signed a deal” for $400 million to put the songs on iTunes.)

I think these things are true about the Beatles and iTunes:

1. The group’s greatest hits collection 1 eventually sold 11 million copies in the U.S. alone. To the extent that the parties involved are crunching numbers, it seems plain that they believe they are one of those few groups left who can still move physical product and that it would be crazy not to take advantage of it.
2. Hard to see how an official digital release of the catalog will come within a year.
3. But the group isn’t solely motivated by money: If it were, the smart move would be to release the catalog to iTunes … then re-release the remasters terrestrially … and then finally put the remastered tracks on iTunes.
4. But that maybe simply be another example of a corollary to 1), namely that the parties involved just aren’t sophisticated enough to understand how to deal with digital releases. There’s a lot of evidence that some people involved aren’t working with the best information. For example, last year George Martin told Billboard: “I think it’s inevitable that sooner or later the Beatles will be available [i.e., on iTunes], but it’s got to be on their terms, really. I think that’s the essence of it. There’s so much piracy, there’s so much illegal downloading.” In other words, he didn’t seem to know that old-fashioned CDs could be ripped.
5. But the ultimate explanation might just be that those same parties—EMI, the survivors, the estates, the publishing companies—have an awful lot of eccentric personalities involved. Folks like that have a way of creating stasis, just by exasperating the other people in the negotiations.

—————-

The press release:

THE BEATLES’ ENTIRE ORIGINAL RECORDED CATALOGUE REMASTERED BY APPLE CORPS LTD. AND EMI MUSIC FOR WORLDWIDE RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 9, 2009 (9-9-09)

London, England – April 7, 2009 – Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music are delighted to announce the release of the original Beatles catalogue, which has been digitally re-mastered for the first time, for worldwide CD release on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 (9-9-09), the same date as the release of the widely anticipated “The Beatles: Rock Band” video game.  Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.

The albums have been re-mastered by a dedicated team of engineers at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in London over a four year period utilising state of the art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment, carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings. The result of this painstaking process is the highest fidelity the catalogue has seen since its original release.

The collection comprises all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ which became part of The Beatles’ core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987. In addition, the collections ‘Past Masters Vol. I and II’ are now combined as one title, for a total of 14 titles over 16 discs.  This will mark the first time that the first four Beatles albums will be available in stereo in their entirety on compact disc.  These 14 albums, along with a DVD collection of the documentaries, will also be available for purchase together in a stereo boxed set. 

Within each CD’s new packaging, booklets include detailed historical notes along with informative recording notes. With the exception of the ‘Past Masters’ set, newly produced mini-documentaries on the making of each album, directed by Bob Smeaton, are included as QuickTime files on each album. The documentaries contain archival footage, rare photographs and never-before-heard studio chat from The Beatles, offering a unique and very personal insight into the studio atmosphere.

A second boxed set has been created with the collector in mind. ‘The Beatles in Mono’ gathers together, in one place, all of the Beatles recordings that were mixed for a mono release. It will contain 10 of the albums with their original mono mixes, plus two further discs of mono masters (covering similar ground to the stereo tracks on ‘Past Masters’).  As an added bonus, the mono “Help!” and “Rubber Soul” discs also include the original 1965 stereo mixes, which have not been previously released on CD.  These albums will be packaged in mini-vinyl CD replicas of the original sleeves with all original inserts and label designs retained.

Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue.  There is no further information available at this time.

www.thebeatles.com

TicketNews reports that the NY senator is planning to introduce a bill that would … well, I’m not sure exactly what it would do:

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, a vocal opponent to the proposed merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, said he is planning to introduce a bill this week that would prohibit all sales of tickets on the secondary market until two days after the tickets initially went on sale to the public.

That seems to mean what it says—that scalpers couldn’t sell tickets for two days after they go on sale. Later in the story, though, we get this:

Supposedly, brokers would not be allowed to purchase tickets until two days after they went on sale, but how that would be monitored was not yet explained. However, his proposal would require brokers to register nationally with the Federal Trade Commission to help eliminate fraud.

The story says the bill would also outlaw presales, where scalped tickets are offered before the real ones even go on sale. It also says that Ticketmaster and Live Nation said they would support the bill.

Anything that messes with scalpers is a good thing,  but it’s hard to see how this would affect scalping at all, which is probably why the companies are OK with it.

The issue isn’t when the tickets are resold.  The issue is the corruption of the process of putting tickets into the hands of the public. If you allow scalping, it sets in motion a variety of efforts by the scalpers to amass the best seats.

This involves everything from paying off insiders for tickets or setting up computer programs to buy the tix automatically many times faster than humans can.

Hard to see what Shumer’s bill would do to stop that.

Pixar is one of those companies for whom even bad news gets spun a little nice.

Consider the NY Times’ look at the company today. The Times is, as always, a serious paper with serious reporters, and Brooks Barnes should be given credit for taking on the subject, which is that some higher-ups at Disney are finally beginning to take a look at Pixar’s ever-declining box office figures.

(See Hitsville’s earlier “Is the Pixar Brand failing?”)

And the story goes deeper than I had imagined, noting that, Cars excepted, the company has been really lagging on the toy merchandising front.

(Cars, incredibly, produced $3 billion in toy sales. Ratatouille and Wall-E? Not so much.)

But the cumulative effects are now showing themselves:

Some industry watchers, a few of them still griping about the hefty $7.4 billion that Disney paid for Pixar in 2006, are fretting about the [forthcoming Up’s] commercial potential, particularly when it comes to benefiting other Disney businesses.

Richard Greenfield of Pali Research downgraded Disney shares to sell last month, citing a poor outlook for “Up” as a reason.

That’s all fine, but check out how Pixar’s box office gets described:

Adjusted for inflation, Pixar’s films have generated a combined $2.65 billion at North American theaters, a spectacular showing. “Finding Nemo” in 2003 was the high point, selling $405.6 million in tickets.

Pixar’s last two films, “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille,” have been the studio’s two worst performers, delivering sales of $224 million and $216 million respectively, according to Box Office Mojo, a tracking service. Attendance for Pixar films has also dropped sharply over the years, suggesting that ticket price inflation helped prop up overall sales for “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille.”

Emphasis added. In the second paragraph, he’s talking about a single metric, the popularity of a Pixar film, as if it has two separate parts. The figures he’s citing are corrected for inflation, so they by definition contain the evidence of the falling attendance, right?

(Inside a studio, there are two metrics; how much money the film made, and how much profit the company made on it. But that’s not the distinction here.*)

I don’t understand why the NY Times and other papers don’t have a single consistent standard for talking about box office figures. There’s a simple one available: Attendance, which can be simply calculated from box office and average ticket prices, with a little tweaking for kids films, which of course average a little bit less.

Absent that, what gets made opaque is the real bad news for Pixar. Here’s how I calculated it a few months ago, emphasis added:

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen any discussion of how Pixar’s formidable box office muscles have been weakening. I’m not buying into the money-equals-quality equation, here; the excellence of the films is a different matter. While no one was looking Pixar became a massively successful company seemingly run entirely by artists. And the company’s probably never going to lose money on a movie.

Still: Wall-E is the fourth film in a row that has brought Pixar’s per-film average down.

For Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc., Pixar averaged a $350 million North American gross, adjusted for inflation. The company’ last four films have averaged $250 million; its last three films $235 million, and last two films $217 million.

Pixar makes a lot of money overseas and from toys; and there hasn’t been a Shrek-sized animated hit in a while from any studio.

But Wall-E’s tepid box office ($223 million, just above Ratatouille’s $212 million) is pretty portentous as it moves forward under the Disney aegis.

The $3 billion in Cars toy sales answers the question of why there will be a Cars sequel, which nobody in the world is clamoring for. That and Toy Story 3, another concession to the bottom line, probably represent the company’s short-term battle plan.

If it doesn’t have a long-term one, sooner or later Disney is going to put the screws to Pixar. When that happens I predict we’ll see a recycling of the same stories we saw about the Weinstein and Disney, or New Line and Time Warner … heavy on sympathies to the victimized artistes, light on the reality that the artists gave up their autonomy when they sold themselves to the big bad wolf for $7.4 billion.

* In the story, Barnes writes:

The budget for “Up” is about $175 million excluding marketing, on par with other Pixar titles.

Box Office Mojo, however, says that Finding Nemo, by contrast, cost $94 million just six years ago. The disparity in budgets and appeal overseas means that, in strict dollar terms, Pixar made about one tenth as much profit on Wall-E as it did on Nemo.

If people are talking about how a CD is being sold more than they are the actual music on the disc, let the buyer beware.

Latest candidate for Sellout Watch is Prince, who is selling his new release exclusively at Target:

The ad is for a three-CD set the retailer is offering for about twelve bucks. One of the records is by a protege; the other two are by him.

I’m happy to listen to any Prince album, but I’m pretty sure that these will be like the ones he’s been tossing out for the last ten years: interesting, but with few actual good songs you’d want to hear again.

In the Nineties, of course, Prince did the same thing—recorded too few good songs—but made it worse with a decade of petulant behavior. He tried to change his name to a symbol and fought idiotically with his record company*. Even his shows became self-indulgent and unfun**.

But faced with a potential Michael Jackson problem (expenditures of a star, but lacking star-level income), he started playing nice, doing interviews, reasserting his live chops and, not least, racheting up the marketing.

That’s why he played the Super Bowl. The Target deal is just the latest example we’ve seen of an artist figuring out ways to monetize something (generally their recordings) that really don’t have much worth any more, either aesthetically or commercially.

The sellers (the remorselessly focused Target***, in this instance, but they range from Starbucks to Wal-Mart) are using the artists as brand identifiers, so they don’t care about the quality of the product they are sluffing off on their customers. (Among other things, Prince no longer has to worry about a label person telling him his new record sucks.)

The artists get free TV promotion; I might have missed a more grievous example, but I’m pretty sure Prince dancing around in that Target-red landscape represents a new low for craven selling out by a once-serious artist. (When he was whining about Warner Bros., he wrote the word “slave” on his cheek; in this ad, he all but has a Target logo tattooed on his forehead.)

This is pure gold for the retailer, since the real point of the ads is to get folks into the stores to buy stuff other than the CD in question, which is being sold as a loss leader in any case. And, again, the retailers don’t have to worry about customer satisfaction.

In the event, the Prince set is expected to sell 150,000 to 200,000 units; that’s much less than what AC/DC or the Eagles sold, fewer even that what Axl Rose did with his execrable Best Buy deal for the quickly forgotten Chinese Democracy.

But he doesn’t care, but he’s already taken home a truckload of cash. I don’t know how the deal is structured. Under traditional label-retailer arrangements, a store might pay, in crude terms, $10 per CD wholesale and sometimes sell the discs below cost to get people into the store.

For all I know, the store could just be paying Prince a flat sum and would just take the new release off his hands. (From what I’ve read, part of the appeal to the artist is that there are no returns of unsold discs.)

So it’s hard to tell how much money the deal is ultimately worth; if the store is giving him the equivalent of $15 per unit (i.e., for each three-disc package), sales of 500,000 total, which is all that seems likely unless he pulls off a fluke hit, would mean the deal would be worth $7.5 million. That’s a heady premium, of course, over the $1 million, say, he might have gotten under typical industry royalty rates a decade ago.

Since Target is selling the things for $12, its net cost might only be $1.5 million for the deal, which just comes out of its marketing budget.

So it’s all good for Prince … until his next release, when a new search for a marketing novelty begins.

* Warner Bros., against which Prince carried out a range war in the late 1990s, signed him as a teen and gave him creative control of his recordings. He had decades of stardom to revise his contracts to his liking.

** Here’s a live blog from EW showing that Prince is still acting the diva live; doing a series of three shows, he started a half-hour to an hour late in each, and couldn’t be bothered to get the sound right. When artists have sound problems, as he did that night, they like to play the victim. But it’s their show! Who else is responsible? If there are sound problems, it means they probably didn’t bother to do a sound check.

*** I was once at a panel discussion at the Pulitzer Art Museum in St. Louis; for some reason, a Target exec had been included on the dais. When it came time for her to speak, she hijacked the event by playing a ten- or fifteen-minute long Target promotional video.