Bruce Springsteen is looking for a Super Bowl assist

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Kurt Warner isn’t the only old guy who could use Sunday’s Super Bowl to get a nice bounce.

Aging rockers also have had success using network broadcasts of past Super Bowl halftime shows to jumpstart album sales and digital downloads of their hit songs.

Which brings us to Bruce Springsteen, who, along with the E Street Band, is using the Super Bowl XLIII halftime show to kick off a world tour that will take him to L.A. on April 15 and then on to such European destinations as Stockholm and Vienna.

The tour is designed to promote sales of ‘Working on a Dream,’ his latest album. And, based on some early, lukewarm reviews, Springsteen and the E Street band might need the kind of help that the Super Bowl has to offer.

Nielsen Media Research reports that last year’s Super Bowl halftime attraction, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, saw sales of their ‘Greatest Hits’ album soar by 33,000 units during the week after the big game. That was a 196% jump over the preceeding week.

Nielsen also reports that digital downloads -- by paying customers, not digital scofflaws -- of such Petty hits as ‘Free Fallin’ and ‘American Girl’ rose by 150%.

Other aging rockers havey enjoyed similar Super Bowl bounces.

In 2007, Prince saw a doubling in sales of his catalog, according to Nielsen. A year earlier, the Rolling Stones enjoyed a 34% increase in sales of their ‘A Bigger Bang’ album. And, in 2005, Paul McCartney’s live album, which had been released in 2002, enjoyed a 542% sales increase in the week following the big broadcast.

-- Greg Johnson