Music stars' digital strategies still in flux

By Antony Bruno

DENVER (Billboard) - It's been more than five years since Apple's iTunes store changed music retail by introducing single-track digital downloads. But it wasn't until 2008 that most musicians and labels started to wonder out loud whether selling music by the track is good for their bottom lines.

Two of the year's biggest rock acts, AC/DC and Kid Rock, insist that their albums only be sold whole. And since Apple only rarely allows this, neither act allows iTunes to sell its albums in the United States.

Despite the fact that iTunes is the largest music retailer in the country, neither act seems to have suffered for this decision. As of early December, Kid Rock's "Rock N Roll Jesus" was the third-best-selling album of the year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. And it was sold only as a CD until almost a year after release, when Kid Rock granted Rhapsody the exclusive rights to sell it online in the States -- as a full album. So far, the album has sold only 3,000 digital copies.

AC/DC released its new album "Black Ice" exclusively at Wal-Mart and has sold 1.6 million copies without any digital sales at all; it's the fourth-best-selling album of the year.

Both of these success stories challenged the accepted gospel that iTunes is an essential part of music retail. Perhaps more surprising is that neither project appeared on file-sharing networks more frequently than most big albums, according to Eric Garland, CEO of the file-trading monitoring company BigChampagne.

"Check some of these artists that have hit singles versus their album sales, then compare it to what Kid Rock is doing," Ken Levitan, Kid Rock's manager, told the Wall Street Journal. He has called digital single sales the death knell of the music business.

FLIP SIDE

But there's another side to the story. The year's best-selling album is Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," at 2.7 million copies. Digital stores played a big part in that success: His "Lollipop" single alone sold more than 3 million copies. The second-best-selling album is Coldplay's "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," with 1.9 million units sold. More than half a million of those copies were sold on digital services.