Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers will play the coveted halftime slot at the Super Bowl in Arizona on February 3, organizers of the year's No. 1 television event said on Sunday...

Petty's performance will mark a rare occasion where the veteran rocker is closely aligned with a corporate sponsor, in this case the North American arm of Japanese tire firm Bridgestone Corp, which has lent its name to the halftime event.

Now that he's aged enough to play the old rock crank with a straight face, Petty is "an outspoken opponent of sponsorship of rock concerts," but he must have overcome his aversion when he saw the checkthought about bringing the rock to all those hundreds of millions of American girls. So now we won't accidentally nod off during the middle of "Hotel California," and the NFL gets to placate the portion of its audience who loves those John Mellencamp Chevy commercials. Hey, maybe they should have gone with the Coug, since he doesn't seem so bothered by auto-industry sponsorship.

Tom Petty To Play Super Bowl Halftime Show [Reuters]

The best part: The only store that was willing to 'fess up to getting its inventory at the big-box store was a small shop in Nebraska, while a Virgin clerk, when asked whether or not the albums were imports, whispered to RS he "thinks they were hard to get." Which implies either a long car ride or some weird hand-off system because the Virgin clerk didn't want to be seen actually shopping at Wal-Mart. The albums apparently just started popping up in stores today, so what this means for Eden's SoundScan tallies is still up in the air; given that Wal-Mart bought those three million albums from the Eagles on a no-returns basis, though, one might suspect that the powers that be in Arkansas are a bit alarmed by the way that their low prices are having the odd effect of cannibalizing their sales.

Breaking News: "Exclusive" Wal-Mart Eagles Album Not So Exclusive [RS]

In consultation with Nielsen SoundScan, Billboard will now allow exclusive album titles that are only available through one retailer to appear on The Billboard 200 and other charts, effective with this week's charts. Prior to this, proprietary titles were not eligible to appear on most Billboard charts.

Early SoundScan numbers have the Eagles taking the top perch on The Billboard 200 with 711,000 copies sold, with most sales moved by Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores. For now, the only other U.S. outlets carrying "Eden" are walmart.com, where both physical copies and downloads are sold, and the Eagles' own Web site. ...

"We know that some retailers will be uncomfortable with this policy, but it was inevitable that Billboard's charts would ultimately widen the parameters to reflect changes that are unfolding in music distribution," says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's director of charts. "We would have preferred to make this decision earlier, but only became aware within the last 24 hours that Wal-Mart would be willing to share the data for this title with Nielsen SoundScan."

Ah, the power of being able to ensure you've won before the results of your battle are announced! Although it's funny (in a "wow, the business is circling the drain even faster now!" way) that the likelihood of this new rule influencing Wal-Mart's decision to slash shelf space for music in the new year is probably nil.

Revised Chart Policy Lands Eagles At No. 1 [Billboard]

On the official SoundScan tally, to be released at end-of-day today and published in Billboard later this week, the victor will be Britney Spears's Blackout, with about 300,000 albums sold.

But in terms of actual, nationwide sales, the winner—announced this afternoon in a press release—is the Eagles' Long Road Out of Eden, with a staggering 700,000 sold.

That's the second-largest first-week total of the year, and it was achieved through just one chain: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (including Sam's Club and the Wal-Mart/Sam's websites). And therein lies the confusion, and the problem for us score-keepers.

Yes, sports fans: for those of you who have been rooting for the reunion of the Frey-Henley axis to thwart poor little Brit girl's comeback, your lesser-of-two-evils pick has indeed emerged victorious. (We here at Idolator would've preferred Britney to the Eagles, for all sorts of reasons, but we can debate that another time.) What sucks about the Eagles' win is what this does to chart history—arguably a far worse blow than anything Radiohead did this year.

The Billboard 200 is the main, industry-approved album chart, heir apparent to the former "Top Pop Albums," which before that was "Top Stereo Albums," and so on—it's got decades of history. What you might not know about the album chart is that Billboard, at the behest of the industry folk who rely on its data, scrubs from the chart literally dozens of albums that don't meet its criteria for either currency or general availability.

The rules were set in place in the early '90s, when SoundScan made it painfully clear that Led Zeppelin IV and Dark Side of the Moon would keep selling well enough to chart in the top 200 week after week, crowding out decent-selling new albums by fledgling acts. So, for the last decade and a half, albums that fall below the top half of the chart and are more than two years old are permanently removed. This even includes Christmas albums that return to the charts year after year.

More recently, around the turn of the millennium, a second rule was added—largely at the behest of the record-retailing community—removing from the chart any new album that is not generally available for sale to all stores. Call it "the Big Box rule": as more superstar acts decided to sell exclusive product through Wal-Mart, Target and CIrcuit City (and, more recently, Starbucks), Billboard declared that such albums would not be eligible for the big chart. (The rule was also practical, since some of these retailers wouldn't report sales of their exclusive albums to SoundScan, anyway.)

As a compromise, Billboard introduced a chart a few years ago, Top Comprehensive Albums, that would include literally everything: Starbucks and Wal-Mart exclusives, Mannheim Steamroller, the umpteenth sale of Bat Out of Hell, you name it. It could be argued that this is a more "real" chart than the "official" chart trumpeted by SoundScan every week. (Wouldn't you love to know that the Beatles' 1 outsold Buckcherry last week?) But Billboard treats Top Comprehensive Albums as an industry exclusive: it's unpublished in the magazine and on the public Web site and only available to online subscribers.

None of this has been a problem, historically—most weeks, even perennials like Bob Marley's Legend don't sell well enough to place in the upper ranks of the Comprehensive chart, and the exclusive CDs that have been reported to Billboard generally fall short of the Top 10, much less threaten that week's chart-topper.

Which brings us to the Eagles, and their Wal-Mart-exclusive smash: it will be No. 1 this week, by a two-to-one margin, over Britney's new CD. And 98% of the known world won't know that. Whether you get your chart data here, over at Billboard.com, or from the little "bumper" flashed at CNN before they go to commercial, you'll be seeing Billboard 200 data. This even though the Eagles' total gives them the second-best sales week of the year; back in September, they would've beaten 50 Cent and come within a quarter-million copes of Kanye West's Graduation.

Eagles manager Irving Azoff may be one of the most historically detested figures in the music industry (if you're wondering why Fast Times at Ridgemont High has so much incongruous Eagles-related music in it, he's your fall guy); but you can hardly blame him for braying in HITS about his band's stellar week. It wasn't even a squeaker. The real loser isn't Britney, who posts a perfectly respectable comeback; it's rank-and-file CD retailers. And, to a far lesser extent, chart geeks like me.

Spears' "Blackout," her first studio album since 2003, led Nielsen SoundScan's Building Chart with 124,000 sold when the chart was released earlier today (Oct. 31). The Eagles' "Long Road Out of Eden" was missing from that list, which suggests Wal-Mart will choose not to report sales from the title, as was the case with exclusive Garth Brooks albums it sold in prior years.

"If the Eagles were SoundScanning this week, even though it's only available at one retailer, Britney wouldn't be No. 1" on the Building Chart, said Azoff, speaking by phone Wednesday from London, where the Eagles played a showcase for media and Universal Music Group honchos at Indigo2 Club.

Billboard notes that "Wal-Mart has until the end of the tracking week to decide whether it wishes to report sales of the Eagles album" and that the chain is reporting that the album's sales "exceeded projections by 50%," which means we could still be looking at a soft rock coup next week. But c'mon, even if Blackout was terrible, rather than the unexpectedly decent dance-pop album it turned out to be, only the most ardent Brit-hater could honestly be rooting for the friggin' Eagles to trump her at the last minute.

Eagles May Have Week's Best Seller [Billboard]

SPORTSbyBROOKS ("SbB") has learned exclusively today that the National Football League is in final negotiations to sign the Eagles to perform at halftime of the 2008 Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona.

An announcment was not imminent, but a source said the likelihood of a deal being struck between the band and the league was "90%".

The NFL's initial choice as headline halftime performer was Garth Brooks, but negotiations with the country performer broke down.

Of course, this is an "exclusive" scoop which quotes itself as its primary source in its own headline, but it does go on to say that "SbB was also first to report that Prince would perform as the 2007 Super Bowl halftime performer." So, yeah, we'll probably have to suffer through (goddamn it) the Eagles or switch over to the (probable) Law and Order marathon. I'm not sure if there's enough Bud or Bud Light in the world for this.

Eagles Halftime Show Likely According To Sports By Brooks [Sports By Brooks]