Britney Spears is poster child for industry that sells celebrity first.

Byline: Greg Kot

Hmmmm, let's see, what's Britney Spears selling this week? Oh, yes, she's got a new album, "In the Zone" (Jive), out Tuesday. As for the music it contains _ does it really matter?

No wonder the music industry, crippled by years of declining revenue, is getting out of the business of strictly selling music. Its future lies in pushing one-woman self-marketing machines like Spears for whom music is just another product line.

With CD sales plunging and consumers by the tens of millions turning to the Internet for a free music fix, the multinational corporations who dominate the $12 billion business know they need to embrace a new entertainment model to lead them back to profitability. The new question becomes: how to sell music-related product in an age when recorded music has lost substantial commercial value?

Enter Spears as the poster child for the new music business, a role model for a wave of telegenic performers who sell ... everything. It's easy to overlook the idea that Spears is a singer amid all the other stuff she's been pushing in recent years: the risque video shoots, the derriere-baring and topless magazine covers, the soft-drink commercials, the step-into-my-shower concert finales, the breathless interviews about when she did what with whom (insert name of tattooed and pierced pop celebrity here). In the end what sticks isn't the music but the titillation: the ex-Mouseketeer traipsing down the hall in her schoolgirl outfit, the did-she-or-didn't-she sexual escapades of her teen-pop romantic summit with Justin Timberlake, the French kiss with Madonna.

Once these…