I got this funny feeling that there was an agreement in place BEFORE all the hoopla over whether concert giveaways would count towards sales of Musicology. Billboard probably gave Prince the OK based on his recent touring history (theater-size venues) and recent retail sales figures (100,000+, give or take). How many cd's would really count to the figure...3-4000 seat theaters, 50 shows maybe...somewhere between 150-200 thousand cd's would have been counted. But then all of a sudden, Prince becomes hot again, his arena tours sell out months in advance (with multiple shows in many cities) and his cd actually does surprisingly good retail business, compared with his prior releases within the last 5 years. With all the sudden media on Prince, the bundle pack becomes an issue. Thus, rather than say that all artists will be able to do the same, Billboard announces that any artist in the future will have to sell their tickets at different prices if the cd is included.

of course this is all speculation.

My guess (knowing NOTHING about the music biz, lol) is that he had his lawyer go over the shit really carefully & have an argument ready (i.e. what counts as "sales"). They went ahead w/ it, let Billboard work it out & if they had any problems they'd just prove that they were operating under Billboard policy all along. So if Billboard wanted to change the definition of what qualifies as "sales" they could do so after the fact.

Does any of that tripe make sense?