Madonna 360 degree contract becomes more 270, 260-ish

Back in 2007, you'll recall that amid much hoopla, Madonna signed a ten year deal with LiveNation for everything:

The 10-year deal encompasses all of Madonna's future music and music-related businesses, including the exploitation of the Madonna brand, new studio albums, touring, merchandising, fan clubs/Web sites, DVDs, music-related television and film projects and associated sponsorship agreements. This model will address all of Madonna's music ventures as a total entity for the first time in her career.

"The real story here is while everyone's talking 360 [degree deals], we were quietly building the services to do it right," Rapino says. "We have spent a considerable amount of resources building this Artist Nation division first and then going after artists second. Madonna would not have done a 360 deal with us just because of our touring capability. We had to prove to her and others that we have been working on and built a very good execution capacity at Artist Nation."

Surprising, then, that she's just signed a three album deal with Universal.

Perhaps LiveNation weren't quite as good at being a record label as they thought they were. Perhaps they should have spent less time on the execution capacity, and focused on the records?