The Billboard Boxscore column this week is topped by a show featuring Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, Sammy Hagar (!) and Gary Allan at a football stadium in Phoenix. It grossed $3.15 million. Artists can’t live on such paltry paydays alone; fortunately the same lineup did just south of that a week earlier in Cleveland.

Country has a reputation for keeping ticket prices cheap, but both shows had a $75 average ticket price. (And I assume the reported one doesn’t include Ticketmaster fees, a good chunk of which typically go back to the artist.)

Dueling stories on the new Wal-Mart exclusivity deals in the WSJ ($) and the NYT today. Unfortunately for the Times, the Journal is ahead of the curve on the story on two counts:

Veteran rockers AC/DC are set to become the next major band to sell a new album only through Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, a move that highlights the growing music-industry clout of Wal-Mart.

The AC/DC deal, however, comes at a time when the retail giant—the largest seller of compact discs in the nation—is signaling it may rock the music world by stocking fewer CDs. Such a move is part of a trend that would further accelerate the already steep decline of CD sales as consumers make the transition to digital music.

The Times story focuses mostly on Irving Azoff’s Front Line Management; it details the boost some of the company’s artists, like the Eagles and Journey, have gotten from the retailer, and doesn’t mention AC/DC:

The deals highlight the changing dynamics of the music industry as once-powerful labels decline because of the migration to digital downloads. To fill the gap, musicians are scrambling to connect with fans, and Wal-Mart is using these exclusive deals to assume a new role: hit maker.

The Eagles’ double disc, “Long Road Out of Eden,” sold 711,000 copies in its first week and three million since its release, according to Nielsen SoundScan, impressive numbers at a time when CD sales are declining. Journey sold 45,000 albums in its first three days on sale, and Irving Azoff, founder and chief executive of Front Line Management and a music industry veteran who ran MCA Records in the ’80s, predicted that it would sell more than 80,000 copies in its first week. That is probably enough to debut in the top five, and significantly more than its last album sold in total.

As Hitsville had mentioned before, the trouble with these single-outlet deals is that they are based on novelty. The Eagles’ status is unique at this point—no one would have guessed they would sell three million copies of that dreadful Eden album—but it’s hard to believe their next release will do that well. As for Journey, well, this is probably going to be their last hurrah. (The band’s distinctive lead singer, Steve Perry, left the band some time ago and it has used fill-ins ever since.)

With Starbucks, the acts that can take advantage of its sale potential begins with your Lucindas and Elvis Costellos and Norah Joneses and starts to get thin after that. For Wal-Mart, there’s the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC and Steve Miller, maybe Tom Petty and Eric Clapton in a few years, and then that potential pool gets shallow as well.

The artists deserve the money—and it’s smart to make an end-run around the labels. (Though note that that’s not what AC/DC, which is still on Sony, is doing.) But in truth, these are just the sort of one-off deals bands in their twilight have always done, as the half-life of their celebrity brings them back, periodically, to public attention.

Reports Silicon Valley Insider:

Warner Music Group (WMG) has pulled its catalog out of Last.fm’s “on demand” free streaming service, which the CBS-owned service launched to great fanfare in January. Users can still hear Warner artists via the site’s “radio” option, which doesn’t allow you to select individual songs. But you can’t order up individual songs from WMG artists.

Why is this important? Two reasons. One, it underscores the fragility of the appeal of these streaming services, whether they charge a monthly fee or not. All this talk about the “millions of songs” promised in the ads obscures the fact that the universe of songs the vast majority of people want or are interested in is a much smaller one—I’m guessing, but let’s say 100,000 songs, representing maybe 10,000 CDs—and that the services in question at any given time are lacking a lot of those.

(This is anecdotal, but consider Hitsville’s essay on covers of “Walk Away Renee”: The iTunes Store has a lot more versions than I expected it would—and blew my mind by having the Gabor Szabo rendition. But it still lacks four or five fairly high-profile covers of it—Rickie Lee Jones, Vonda Shepard, Terry Reid—… and the Left Banke’s original.)

Losing the songs from a huge label like Warners can only hurt.

And secondly, there’s a simmering debate in the industry about where the money companies are getting from such services is going. Is it being apportioned back to the artists—and if so, by what accounting method? (A traditional ten to twenty percent royalty payment, or the fifty percent “licensing” standard?) And a lot of the time, of course, the money just goes into the label’s general fund and isn’t given to the artists at all.

There may be a Catch 22 developing here; the value of the services increases with comprehensiveness, but if each label begins nickel-and-diming the services, they will never reach critical mass—dashing the dreams of those in the industry who think the subscription model is the only thing that can save it.

It’s Monday and time for another new music service. A new deal of this sort requires a media borg of the past to “team up” with a media borg of the future to try to figure out a way to sell stuff to people who are slowly beginning to realize they don’t have to pay for it any any more and in any case generally buy it from Apple when they do.

The new borg this time is MySpace; the borgs of the past are record companies, three of the four biggies, Warner, Sony and Universal, with EMI expected to join soon.

They Times story on this Very Important New Development is here.

WSJ here. The Journal says:

MySpace Music will offer free, ad-supported audio “streaming” and sell digital downloads that will play on a variety of music devices, as well as concert tickets, merchandise, and ring tones and other content for mobile phones.

The new service, the Times tells us:

[…] is also an attempt to encourage competition to Apple’s iTunes Store, which some music executives have criticized for exercising too much control in pricing and on other business terms.

As we have seen in the past, “exercising too much control in pricing” translates roughly into “stopping us from raising prices.”

What the companies want to do is do what they used to do: When they have hot new product they think they can get away with charging a premium for, they want to jack up the price. Because of the file-sharing neworks, it’s going to be harder and harder for the labels to do this.

But a company can dream, can’t it?

Still: HWTAA?

(How will this affect Apple?)

Steve Jobs does OK. The new service will sell mp3s, which are compatible with folks’ iPods. And other services are one watermarking or rootkit scandal away from self-immolation.

Most interesting is the tie-in with merchandising. It’s smart for the labels to at least attempt stick themselves in the mix with these (lucrative) products, though the stories are vague about whether these will be label-MySpace deals or done separately with the artists.

The stories say the service will open later this year.

The New York Post has an unexpectedly substantive story about the funds from the settlements the majors made with the various file-sharing networks some years back. If you recall, Napster alone shelled out more than $250 million to three of the four major labels. (Sony/BMG by that time had corporate connections to the service.)

None of this had yet been disbursed to the artists. (They are the ones the record companies are fighting for, right?)

A contingent of prominent artist managers claims that little to none of that money has trickled down to their clients. They are now considering legal action.

“Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for,” said lawyer John Branca, who has represented Korn, Don Henley, and The Rolling Stones, among others.

“Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don’t get paid soon.”

The story talks to an unnamed company source who said that after legal fees there wasn’t much left. The writer also quotes Irving Azoff, who says that some labels are trying to assess the money against unrecouped advances.

Ars Technica notes the year anniversary of the RIAA’s war on college students with a chat with RIAA prez Cary Sherman.

As Billboard noted in a column I mentioned last week, CD sales are down another nearly 20 percent for January from last year. The effect the RIAA’s campaign against its customers is having can only be described a truly excellent. Sherman is now in the precise position of a captain of a sinking ship directing his crew to take pot shots at the rats leaving it.

But Ars is polite.

Here’s how the numbers look after a year. The RIAA has sent out 5,404 letters in 13 “waves” to over 160 colleges and universities. Of the 5,003 settlement letters sent prior to the batch of 401 that went out last week, “more than” 2,300 of those have resulted in the targeted students settling with the RIAA. 2,465 students have been hit with lawsuits, and all of those are moving through the legal system at different rates. At $3,000 per settlement, over 2,300 settlements translates into at least $6.9 million.

There are other numbers you can generate from those figures. For instance, let’s estimate, I don’t know, $5,000 in RIAA legal fees for each of the cases it pursues. Multiply that by the roughly 2500 cases, and you have more than $10 million. Even if the group’s legal fees are half that, it’s still a wash financially, before you take into account the millions more its silly media campaign costs. And, as the continuing decline in sales indicates, it’s obvious the group’s war is having no effect.

You want to call the effort quixotic, but Don Quixote wasn’t sadistic, vengeful and grim.

The interview is mostly filled with Sherman’s spinning whatever questions Ars asks. Like this:

“Our basic survey data is that the majority of consumers don’t have a problem with the lawsuits,”   [Sherman said]. “You would never know that from reading blogs and websites, [but] when you go out to the general public, our favorables/unfavorables haven’t changed at all.”

But of course, among not the general public but music fans, one suspects the group’s unfavorables have changed. (On the other hand, it’s possible they couldn’t go any lower!) There are two interesting discussions. One is when Sherman contends that the leveling off of activity on the music networks is a result of the RIAA suits. But a rep from Big Champaign, which monitors such activity, says it’s simply a case of market saturation.

The other is when Sherman is asked why Harvard is absent from the list of schools the RIAA has targeted. Ars speculates that it’s due to the industry’s being afraid of teeing off some of the legal talent at Harvard. That seems a little thin; a lot of colleges and universities have serious law schools, right?

Over in Billboard ($), the mag’s retail columnist, Ed Christman, discusses some of the numbers that have the record industry paralyzed. First, he notes, CD sales were down another 16 percent in January from last year. Given the thrust of his column, he’s focusing on the effects these drops will have on traditional sellers of hard-copy CDs. His main point is that the industry isn’t dead yet; that acts like Josh Groban (who had the best-selling album last year) have very low digital sales, and even a Radiohead is selling a respectable number of physical CDs.

More interesting are these grafs, emphases added:

In the digital world, the labels are getting their heads handed to them on pricing. Not so in the physical world, where labels get a 65% margin, versus a 35% split for retail, which on an $18.98 list comes out to about $12 per album for the label.

[…]

The mobile carriers are just too big, and can command anywhere from 50% to 60% profit margins of music configurations, leaving labels with the 50%-40% remainder. In digital downloads, profits may be split 70% for the label versus 30% for retail, but Apple is still calling the pricing shots, so that 70% profit means $7 versus the $12 a CD brings in.

Christman’s the expert, but I’m not sure that $12 figure is typical, particularly for new releases. Even if it’s $10, however, that’s a hidden 30 percent decline in sheer dollar sales that doesn’t get mentioned much. In crude terms, in other words, even if digital downloads completely supplanted physical sales, the industry could look forward to a 30 percent decline in profits.

Previously: The Year in CD Sales: It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.

As of today the editorial pages of both the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal have offered their thoughts on the new album by the Eagles, “Long Road Out of Eden.” (The album, you will recall, was offered for sale only at Wal-Mart; prompted a revision of the Billboard charts, which previously had excluded CDs not universally available; and ended up topping the charts that week with 710,000 copes sold.) The Times editorial, from last Sunday, discussed the prime criticism of the album—that the band, with its latter-day anthems attacking environmental despoliation and corporate greed, had gotten in bed with a big source of such problems—and ended on a cautious note:

Have the Eagles sold out? Mr. Henley says that by doing business with Wal-Mart, he has more influence and easier access to the company’s executives, including the ones responsible for trying to make the company more environmentally conscious. His argument is almost certainly bolstered by the strong sales of ”Long Road Out of Eden.”

We hope, with him, that he has the influence he suggests, otherwise this arrangement may well turn out to be nothing more than a long road to Wal-Mart.

The WSJ editorial ($), impishly hedded “Desperados,” took a much rosier view:

In cutting out the record company, the band cut itself in for a bigger share of the per-album profits. While it might have expected fewer sales from restricted availability, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Wal-Mart’s retail price of under $12 for the two-disc album has allowed smaller retailers to stock up on the album at Wal-Mart and then resell them with a markup.

The Eagles aren’t the first to try new ways to sell a record. Garth Brooks signed an exclusive deal in 2005 with Wal-Mart and has sold millions of records. Beyonce has released an exclusive DVD through the store. Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney are selling their music through Starbucks. Billy Joel’s daughter, Alexa Ray, is trying to establish her own music career by doing an exclusive with Target.

These and others are evidence that Napster and its filesharing successors weren’t the death of the music business but a smart bomb that forced the creation of new delivery models. Apple’s iTunes is the most famous. But the Web has allowed thousands of bands to find new audiences, and even create global niche brands. Thanks to the Internet, a Norwegian metal band named Enslaved has been able to fill small town bars and auditoriums in the U.S.

The unexpected, wholly thrilling appearance of Enslaved on the WSJ ed page comes from a NYT piece on the band from a week or so ago. The editorial concluded:

We believe in property rights as much as anyone, but when technology is changing, businesses have to change too — and that includes the business of music. So let’s applaud Mr. Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh and the other Eagles for some creative capitalism, however politically incorrect.

The trouble here, as with Starbucks’ selling the latest Paul McCartney album, is that these are one-time PR events. The Eagles deal isn’t the start of something new, it’s a last gasp. Barring the band’s conjuring up some new radio hits, the next Eagles album will not be as notable, and selling it only through one retailer probably won’t make any sense. This will of course also be true for Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello and whatever other fading stars are looking for a way to call some attention to themselves when they have a new product to sell.

Financially, it probably was a smart move for the Eagles, just as the Starbucks alliance was a smart move for McCartney. They both will get more money for their crummy new album than they otherwise would. The McCartney record had a high price, as I recall; Starbuck’s strategy was to make the CD as expensive as its upscale clientele would tolerate. Wal-Mart’s audience isn’t so much downmarket as it is more suburban and rural, and carried a much-more-reasonable $12 price tag. (It’s a two-CD set, too.) In both cases, to varying degrees, the retail outlets are subsidizing the artists’ profits. Starbucks’ motivations were mostly marketing driven; they got million of dollars worth of publicity on the deal. For Wal-Mart, the deal was a more traditional loss leader, designed to get folks into its stores to buy the Eagles album and some other crap, as well.

What is down market, in the end, is these artists’ ever-more-limited options when it comes to selling actual records. (Both make kazillions touring.) I said above that selling the next Eagles CD through one retailer probably won’t make sense. When Wal-Mart inevitably passes, however, there may be another, slightly grimier outlet looking for a little buzz to liven its image: K-Mart, say, or possibly Linen ‘n’ Things, or maybe 7-Eleven. I hope I live to see the day the new Eagles album is offered for sale exclusively at the Cracker Barrel.