Our reporter from Canada, Toronto Boy has contributed his point of view to an article about rising ticket prices. Madonna is featured quite prominently (and so is our Toronto Boy).

Click on Full Article to read the piece written by Jim Beckerman, who last week, contacted fansites MadonnaTribe and Madonnalicious looking for readers of both sites to be interviewed.

Concert ticket prices climb relentlessly
Sunday, June 13, 2004
By JIM BECKERMAN
STAFF WRITER
NEW JERSEY RECORD

For $125, you could see Eric Clapton.
Or, you could have dinner at Le Cirque in New York, including 1 ounce of sevruga caviar ($43), tuna tartare with honey mustard and dill vinaigrette ($28), lobster thermidor ($42), and chocolate mousse ($12).

For $254.50, you could see Elton John.
Or, you could fly round-trip to Puerto Rico on American or Continental airlines, and have enough left over for several in-flight rum and Cokes.

For $302, you could see Madonna.
Or, you could buy a Whirlpool DU951 PWB dishwasher or one of a dozen other major household appliances.
Well, you get the idea. Or at least your wallet does.
“Apparently the market will bear this, for the right act,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, a trade publication that covers the concert business.

Fasten your seat belts – some of this summer’s top concert prices in the metropolitan area are going to the stratosphere.

To see Madonna (beginning a six-night engagement Wednesday, Madison Square Garden; July 7 and 8, Continental Airlines Arena), Elton John (July 14-18, Radio City Music Hall), Clapton (June 28-30, Madison Square Garden), and several other major artists from the best seats, people are cheerfully paying the kind of money that used to be reserved for a family vacation, a major appliance, or a medical emergency.

Well, maybe not cheerfully. But they are paying it.
“You also have to remember that most people are buying at least two tickets, so that’s double the cost,” Bongiovanni says. “And God forbid if they want to buy a T-shirt.”

And that, of course, is not counting the average $10 or more in service charges per ticket, and the money that goes to parking, tolls, food, and other ancillary expenses.

Some other big-ticket seats this summer: $250 VIP pass for the Lollapalooza tour (August 16 and 17, Randalls Island), $127 for Sting and Annie Lennox (July 1 and 2, Jones Beach; July 7, PNC Bank Arts Center), $99.50 for Phil Collins (Sept. 17 and 18, Madison Square Garden), $95 for Jimmy Buffett (Sept. 4, Jones Beach), and $87 – a relative bargain – for Prince (July 16 and 18, Continental Arena). Already passing through these parts were Fleetwood Mac ($135) and MAZE featuring Frankie Beverly ($90.75).

Is it worth it? You betcha, says Rose Leens, 54, of Harrington Park. In March she shelled out $250 to see Bette Midler from the best seats at Continental Arena.

“The fact that we were sitting so close, we could practically reach out and touch her,” she says. “I’d pay double to see her again.”

Leens, like many other people, learned the hard way. Last June, she saw Cher from $75 seats at Madison Square Garden. “You’d think for $75 you’d get a decent ticket,” she says. “We were so far away we could only watch her on a monitor.”

Of course, for some people even a monitor would be too close to performers they don’t like.
“I wouldn’t pay $5 to see her, I swear,” Leens says of Madonna.
Lots of other people would, though.
People like Dave Gardner of Toronto, 24, who is seeing five Madonna shows – two at Madison Square Garden – this year, all at the top $302 price.

That’s, let’s see – yikes. $1,510.
And worth every penny, Gardner says.
“It’s an all-encompassing, awesome experience,” says Gardner, who has seen Madonna eight times on three previous tours.
“You can criticize her acting, her vocal ability, but when she puts on a show, it’s really a show,” he says.
When Madonna tickets went on sale, Michelle Serrapica, 30, of New York, didn’t think twice.
She bought tickets to nine shows, including the six at Madison Square Garden and two at Continental. Only two of the nine were the $302 tickets, though. “The other ones I couldn’t get the top ticket,” she says.

Did she think about what else she could get with the roughly $2,000 she spent for these shows?
Not really – though she isn’t putting her family in hock, she says.
“I didn’t take time to say, should I do this,” Serrapica says. “If anybody asked me, my answer was, ‘It’s Madonna.’?”
Though Madonna’s Re-Invention tour features the summer’s priciest seats, she’s not the first to push the $300 envelope.
In Chicago and Houston last year, the Rolling Stones charged a $350 top price; Billy Joel and Elton John charged $300 for the best seats at their joint performance in Detroit.

Naturally, acts that can successfully command those prices are few and far between. It depends on the artist and also, in the case of Madonna, on the circumstances.

“Who knows the next time Madonna will tour?” says Jim Steen, spokesman for Clear Channel Entertainment, which is promoting the Material Girl.

“Acts like [Madonna] are more like Halley’s comet than the coming of spring,” Steen says. “Madonna tours infrequently; you don’t know what her plans are as an artist.”

The average seat at a concert for the top 100 touring acts was about $50.35 last year, Bongiovanni says. But that figure has been creeping up about 8 percent a year – or more, in the case of the very biggest acts – since 1996. “That’s a whole lot faster than the rate of inflation,” he says. “In 2002, it was $46.56. In 1996, the average was $25.81.”

Why the ballooning prices? There’s certainly no shortage of finger-pointing.
Clear Channel is one frequent target. The Texas-based promotional company, which owns more than 85 percent of the U.S. concert market, has been criticized for offering huge guarantees to artists in exchange for exclusive rights to their concert tours – costs that are then transferred to consumers.

Au contraire, says Steen – it’s the artist, typically getting 90 percent of the concert revenue to the promoter’s 10 percent, who sets the agenda. Blame the performers. “If the cost of talent goes up, the cost of tickets tends to rise in proportion,” he says.

But artists are only responding to scalpers, according to talent agent and onetime promoter John Scher.
“The scalpers are forcing the artists’ hands,” Scher says. “There’s no enforcement. The scalpers are going to charge as much as they can. So there’s certainly some wisdom, or at least a school of thought, that if the scalpers are going to charge this, why shouldn’t we charge this?”

If this is the rationale, it’s not working. A check on eBay found folks selling Madonna tickets for $600 to $1,000. Other brokers on the Internet were selling some of the best seats at Madison Square Garden for $1,580, $2,635, and $2,880.

Then too, today’s rock shows are more elaborate, spectacular, and costly affairs than they were years ago, Steen says. Audiences get what they pay for. “Look at what a Madonna show costs,” he says. “Look at the sets. It’s like a Broadway show.”

Whatever the cause, most insiders trace the start of the pricing uptick to 1994, when tiered seating was introduced for Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, and other top acts.

Rock concerts, previously loosey-goosey one-price affairs, suddenly had premium seats at premium prices – a then-unheard-of $65 for Floyd, an even more outrageous $100 for the Eagles. And non-rock shows spiked even higher. Barbra Streisand charged a top $350 ticket price for that year’s Madison Square Garden engagement.

But graying baby boomers, many of whom now had a corporate income to support their counterculture habits, willingly coughed up.

“Going to a concert was no longer a casual event,” Scher says. “It was something that was going to cost you a significant amount.”

Which brings us, 10 years later, to those $302 apiece Madonna tickets, and those $350 Stones tickets.
Surely prices can’t go higher than that, right?
Right?
“If Madonna was to charge $400 five years from now, I’d pay that,” says Chris Chillino, 30, from New York, who is seeing four of the Madison Square Garden concerts at $302 a pop.

“It’s completely worth it for me.”
E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com