Good news for Best Buy (BBY): Exclusive deal for Guns n' Roses album

Billboard announced last week that Best Buy Stores, Inc. (NYSE: BBY) is rumored to be the exclusive retailer for the continuously pending Guns n' Roses album, Chinese Democracy, by the end of 2008. For anyone who does not know about this album, it is likely to be one of the longest produced and most expensive in the history of the music business; it went into production in the mid-1990s.

Helping to fuel this rumor is the band's new management, Irving Azoff's Front Line Management, which has a history of releasing new albums exclusively through single retailers. Front Line released the Eagles return album Long Road Out of Eden through Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) a year ago with massive success. The "new" Guns n' Roses album would predictably see similar success when and if it is ever released, and Best Buy is smart to be grasping at the exclusivity if it is more than a rumor.

But will the album's release recoup the amount of money spent producing it? This is one of the major reasons the album is continuously unreleased, despite rumors of release dates and its appearances on release schedules. A March 2005 article by the New York Times stated that production costs had reached $13 million, a figure that could only have increased in the following three and a half years. These high figures raise the question of whether the album will truly be worth release financially, even if it is critically or popularly successful.