Garth Brooks bundles his digital music on GhostTunes

CHICAGO — Garth Brooks' return to touring was a big deal all by itself.

But it wasn't big enough for the top-selling solo artist in U.S. history.

Today, shortly before kicking off the first of 11 shows at Chicago's Allstate Arena, the country superstar launched a digital music service called GhostTunes to sell his music and that of other artists.

"Today with all the scaredness in my soul, all the love in my heart for music, an alternative for digital music sales is online, up and ready," Brooks said at a pre-concert media conference.

GhostTunes, which will compete directly with iTunes and other digital sales services, already has its first coup: The Bundle, a digital package that allows Brooks' fans to buy the singer's first eight studio albums and his 1998 Double Live album, as well as pre-order his next two albums, all for $29.99.

"You can get it all in one package, digitally, for those people who waited," Brooks said. "And the price is stupid."

Brooks had been digital music's highest-profile holdout, refusing to work with existing services such as iTunes that insisted on making album tracks available as individual downloads.

"We sell albums," he said. "That's what we do. My job is to make the album worth the price we're asking."

New single People Loving People, which was shipped to radio Wednesday, is available for download through GhostTunes, as well as Brooks' website, but only as a pre-order for an album expected to be released on Black Friday (Nov. 28).

In addition to that album, Brooks says he will release a second album in fall 2015.

Brooks said Chicago made sense as the first stop on his world tour, for which he has also announced dates in Atlanta and Jacksonville. "It's the center of the heartland," he said.

Scotty Bredin, a fan on Twitter, asked the singer via USA TODAY how he would describe "Garth" to a generation experiencing his music and his shows for the first time. "I'm 8 feet tall, I have a lot of hair, and I'm very thin," Brooks joked.

Then, turning more serious: "If he's going to come and give us the chance to show him what we do, then our job is to make it worth it. Then his job after that, if we've done our job right, is to tell other people that are younger than him, or whatever, what there is to see."

Calling the shows "the official wheelchair-and-walker tour," Brooks noted that the newest member of his band had been playing with him for 19 years.

As for the opening-night audience, "hopefully they'll be very forgiving, because tonight's show is going to suck," he said. "You want it to be the worst night of the tour, because you want to get better every night."