Yesterday (“Getting the Stones story wrong”) we saw transcontinental confusion, from London (The Observer) to San Fransisco (Wired News) about rumors that had the Rolling Stones working on a 360 deal with Live Nation.

Today, Reuters has a story saying the Stones are denying the reports. Well, sort of:

“We are not in talks with Live Nation in connection with any record deal,” London-based Rolling Stones spokesman Bernard Doherty said on Monday, reading from a brief statement.

If the denial is to be believed, the Observer was talking through its hat. The story included this assertion: “It is understood that Universal will have a role, with Live Nation licensing new versions of the [Stones’] catalogue to the American label, which would sell them online and as CDs.”

Whether the comment was designed to smooth ruffled feathers at EMI or just to keep attention focused on the band isn’t clear. A touring deal between the Stones and Live Nation will at once be more and less significant than Madonna’s or Jay-Z’s. It certainly won’t be a long-term set-up; Mick Jagger is 65, fifteen years older than Madonna, and sooner or later exhaustion or, sad to say, death is going to catch up with the band.

On the other hand, the Stones’ tour grosses are in a class by themselves; if Live Nation signed the band tomorrow just for touring (not even merchandise) and gave the group an advance equal to the gross of its last tour, that figure ($550 million) would be bigger than that of the Madonna and Jay-Z deals combined.

Meanwhile, Wired corrects itself for a mistake it didn’t make. Originally it repeated the Observer, which said the Stones had been with EMI for 31 years; Wired now says the band had only been with EMI since the conglomerate bought Virgin. But this is true only for U.S. releases; the group did have EMI distribute Rolling Stones Records for the rest of the world since the late 1970s. (My source is Old Gods Almost Dead.)

Wired doesn’t correct its figure for the group’s last tour grosses (”nearly three quarters of a billion dollars”) and displays its unfamiliarity with the concert-ticketing industry as well:

When the company’s contract with TicketMaster runs out next year, it will hopefully bring more competition to the online ticketing market, though we’re not holding our breath.

The company isn’t going to compete with Ticketmaster; it’s going to take the exorbitant and unnecessary fees the company collected for itself!

The Observer reports, and Wired’s Listening Post blog picks up, a story that the the Rolling Stones will soon sign a 360 deal with Clear Channel Live Nation. As is typical in such stories, they are largely promotional, don’t examine the implications of the figures they are reporting, and are contradictory of other recent reportage.

From the Observer:

The Rolling Stones are on the verge of ending their 31-year relationship with EMI, dealing a blow to private equity owner Terra Firma, led by Guy Hands, which acquired the label in a £3.2bn deal last summer.

Sources say the group is close to clinching a deal with Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion firm, which would market its back catalogue, depriving EMI of around £3m a year. Live Nation, which last year poached Madonna from Warner, would also take highly profitable merchandising and touring rights for future Stones shows, some of which have grossed as much as £750m.

Note that the “31-year relationship” refers only to sales outside the U.S. Even by the lower standards of UK journalism, this is pretty silly. It’s unclear if the Stones will take its catalog with them; the NYT reported yesterday that “If the Stones left EMI, it would have little impact financially, because the company would still have the rights to the band’s catalog.” One of the two stories is 100 percent wrong. Also, the implication of the next sentence is that Live Nation is also taking the Stones’ touring business away from EMI, which is not true.

The Observer story says the band makes EMI three million pounds a year; Wired reports this as three million dollars a year. Fortunately, the Observer is a British news outlet, and not a Japanese one, so Wired is off only by a factor of two. Its hard to believe, however, even the Observer story is correct. If the Stones earn the company only the equivalent of $6 million (which is roughly what £3 million is) a year, that would mean (assuming, crudely, a $9 wholesale price and $3 per disc to the band) the band sells only perhaps a million CDs a year, total, around the world, which is less than I would have guessed. (I’d be happy to hear if any of those assumptions are significantly off.)

And, finally, Live Nation didn’t poach Madonna from Warner Brothers. Given her declining sales and the fact that no one yet knows if these 360 deals make financial sense, it may be just as accurate to say the company took her off Warner’s hands.

As for the Wired story, it says, “the Rolling Stones are the kings of the touring industry, with some tours grossing nearly three quarters of a billion dollars.” Only the Stones’ most recent tour, by far its biggest, grossed something over $500 million, over some three years.

It also says:

Live Nation,for its part, has already become a major force to be reckoned with. Its focus on all-encompassing, 360 degree deals means it only stands to benefit as touring threatens to unseat recording as the largest sector of the music business.

This breathless reportage is inappropriate. Live Nation, formerly Clear Channel, controls most of the U.S. concert business and has been “a force to be reckoned with” for more than a decade. It already makes a lot of money from acts like Madonna, the Stones and U2. The question, which again will only be answered as the music business continues to shake out, is whether there’s enough extra leverage to be squeezed out of the deals (i.e., some new creative ways to gouge some extra bucks out of sheeplike music fans) to make the high initial outlays worthwhile.

Since those artists make the vast part of their income from touring—and have been doing so for many decades in every case—they are not lambs coming to the benevolent concert industry for a piece of the action. Mick Jagger knows how much any Stones show will generate in ticket and mersh sales, and begins the negotiations assuming it’s all his.

The tensions this chancy strategy has evinced spilled over into the pages of the Wall Street Journal ($) last week:

Having laid out so much cash—an estimated $120 million for Madonna and $150 million for Jay-Z alone—Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino has sought to slow the pace of deal making so he can ascertain that deals already struck are working before entering new ones. But the company’s chairman, concert promoter Michael Cohl, wants to quickly strike deals with as many as 15 more artists.

According to people familiar with the matter, the dispute in recent weeks boiled over into a full-blown feud, with Mr. Cohl threatening to leave Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Live Nation.

All of these characters, by the way, deserve each other. Madonna and the Stones are artistically moribund, and U2 and Jay-Z are merely superior practitioners of the art of not looking that way. If Live Nation succeeds in harvesting even more big live acts for its stable, it truly will remake the industry; the company will be able to plan tours out years in advance, carefully doling out superstar roadshows to maximize box office, reduce scheduling conflicts, and avoid clustering too many big name acts on the road at any one time.

It will be accomplished by the simple expedient of taking actual artistic creation out of the equation altogether.

Variety’s Todd McCarthy gives “Shine a Light,” the Martin Scorsese Stones concert film, a positive review:

Martin Scorsese’s energetic account of a Stones concert at Gotham’s Beacon Theater in fall 2006 takes full advantage of heavy camera coverage and top-notch sound to create an invigorating musical trip down memory lane, as well as to provoke gentle musings on the wages of aging and the passage of time.

Those who don’t buy into the aren’t-the-Stones-great? tone of almost all coverage of the band can find a lot of cringeworthy undercurrents in the review. For example:

“Shine a Light” is mostly a Mick Jagger show, as a battery of great cinematographers (under the eye of lead d.p. Robert Richardson) keeps its cameras trained on him as he cavorts around the stage and penetrates the audience courtesy of a thrust platform; drummer Charlie Watts, guitarist Ronnie Wood and especially Keith Richards warrant occasional cutaways, as do the numerous side musicians, but the star is the star.

Yeah—who’d want to watch Keith Richards play guitar, anyway? And this:

Sixty-three at the time of the concert, Jagger is not entirely impervious to the ravages of time, and the relentless closeup scrutiny could not be more revealing — not only of his taut muscle tone and evidently fat-free physique, but of his deeply lined face; some low-angle shots are so tight you can examine the dark bridgework on the back of his front teeth.

Sign me up! The review raises some questions about Scorsese’s involvement. He has obvious history in this area: He helped edit the greatest rock movie of all time (”Woodstock”), and directed arguably the second (”The Last Waltz”). But his use of rock music in his films has become a crutch (like the subtle-as-a-flying-mallet use of “Gimme Shelter” in the opening of “The Departed”), and as with his too-agreeable take on Bob Dylan in “No Direction Home” he’s sullying his reputation by lending his tony name to advertisements for the reps of fading stars. Here’s an example from the review:

The band members’ endurance gains perspective through some wonderful interspersed clips and interview footage from earlier decades. Queried as to what question he is most frequently asked, a very young Jagger replies, “How long do you think you’re going to carry on singing?” In 1972, when Dick Cavett asks the star if he could imagine doing what he does at 60, Jagger immediately replies, “Easily.” Jagger’s and Richards’ youthful drug busts are briefly covered, although any mention of Brian Jones is conveniently avoided. But for all the group’s early unsavory reputation, by far the predominant impression Jagger conveys in the archival stuff is one of overwhelming sweetness.

The more-often-quoted Jagger mot on the subject of aging, of course, was that you wouldn’t catch him dead singing “Satisfaction” when he was 45. And “youthful drug busts” aside, Keith Richards’ decades of debilitating heroin addiction essentially destroyed the band’s recording career (it’s taken them an average of five years to throw together a mediocre collection of songs since the early 1980s) and nearly its live one as well. (The Stones toured only once in a 14-year period over the 1980s and 1990s.) Isn’t that one of the most salient facts about the band’s career? How much nicer for the group that the director chooses to mention only those wacky drug busts from the 1960s.