Live Nation said on Tuesday it has signed a global ‘360-degree’ deal with Canadian rock band Nickelback covering the band’s touring, recording and merchandising.

The deal was said to be in the $50 million to $70 million range over the course of the three-album/three-tour deal, according to a source.

The deal could cause some blushes at Warner Music Group. Back in December 2006 Warner paid around $73.5 million for a 73.5 percent stake in Nickelback’s label Road Runner Records — no doubt with hopes to sell many more Nickelback albums for years to come.

But Nickelback, which has sold more 26 million albums to date, still has two more albums to deliver for Road Runner and a greatest hits package,  so there’s every chance that the band’s best album years will be behind it. So this could instead end up being an expensive deal for Live Nation.

Live Nation never confirms how much it agrees to pay for its comprehensive partnerships with major artists. A deal with pop veteran Madonna, another soon-to-be former Warner artist, was reported to be around $120 million spread over ten years. It also has agreements with Jay-Z and more recently Shakira.

Live Nation management’s bet is that its comprehensive 360-degree deals will allow it to make profits in other areas beyond the recording and thereby spread its risk a little wider than a traditional recording and publishing company. The entire music industry is watching closely to see if this gamble works.

 Keep an eye on:

• NFL football team Pittsburgh Steelers is secretly being shopped to potential buyers  (WSJ)
• Washington Post appoints former Wall Street Journal editor Marcus Brauchli as its new editor (New York Times)
• Conde Nast Publications is to shut down Golf for Women (WSJ)

(Photo: Reuters)

I spoke on Wednesday to David Broder, veteran political columnist at The Washington Post and a fixture at the paper for more than 40 years, about deciding to take the buyout that the paper is offering.

As it turned out, “taking the buyout” for Broder, 78, doesn’t mean “leaving” so much as “still writing my column twice a week and coming to work every day.” In other words, he will be a contract employee.

Q: Why leave a place that you joined before a goodly number of us were born:

A: It will allow me to focus entirely on the column while freeing up the Post to use its budget on other newsroom salaries and expenses.

(Tony Kornheiser, the well known Post sports columnist, told me much the same thing: They could probably find someone who would help the paper a lot more than me.)

Q: What do you think about the exit of Posties to The New York Times in the past few years? (Including Sewell Chan, Manny Fernandez and husband-and-wife team Serge Kovaleski and Jo Becker, not to mention Peter Baker who said he left after the paper relieved his wife Susan Glasser of her top editing slot. Oh… and Michael Powell, Ray Rivera, John Schwartz, Mark Leibovich and so on.)

A: I actually worked for 15 minutes at The New York Times, and I was part of the return traffic from the Times to the Post. The notion of moving from The Washington Post to The New York Times is, as far as I’m concerned, not a smart move.

Q: You left the Times in 1966. Why?

A: I fled because of bureaucracy I couldn’t cope with. … I resigned maybe 15 minutes before I would have been fired.

(Photo courtesy of The Washington Post Writers Group)