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.