Some of her fans would pay just about anything to see Barbra Streisand live in concert this summer. But only a few can afford to pay what it takes — as much as $1,000 to obtain a ticket with a face value of $350 for a seat down front at arenas like Anaheim Pond and Madison Square Garden. When the New York Rangers, who haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1940, looked like they would finally do it on home ice last Thursday night, scalpers outside the Garden on game night were asking as much as $5,000 for a ticket with a face value of $125. When it comes to getting tickets for the hottest entertainment and sports events, it’s money that counts. Big money. And as the most star-studded summer concert season in years gets under way — with such performers as Streisand, Billy Joel and Elton John, the Rolling Stones, and the 30 top bands that will appear at Woodstock II — a “holy war” over outrageous ticket prices has broken out, forcing the music industry to choose up sides. Last month Pearl Jam, the popular alternative-rock band from Seattle, called down the wrath of the U.S. Department of Justice against Ticketmaster, by far the largest distributor of sports and entertainment tickets in the U.S. . Pearl Jam claims that Ticketmaster has a near monopoly over tickets and charges inflated service fees, which can range from a typical $4 a ticket to $18 for the hottest acts. Fred Rosen, ceo of Ticketmaster, indignantly rejects thecharge, noting that his firm developed a sophisticated computer system to make it easy for performers to sell large numbers of tickets, and has a right to be paid for the service. Says he: “If Pearl Jam wants to play for free, we’ll be happy to distribute their tickets for free.” The legal battle over who should control tickets and prices comes at a time when fans are already fed up with the scalping that can drive up prices for the most desirable tickets to several times their face value as they are resold, often more than once, by middlemen. These operators are a mix of quick-buck artists at street level, high-priced attorneys who speculate in tickets for profits, corporate executives trading favors, music-industry insiders and Mafiosi who control key blocks of tickets and take a cut of the inflated price. While Pearl Jam is pointing the finger at Ticketmaster’s relatively modest service fees, it is these behind-the-scenes brokers who are responsible for the hundreds of dollars added to the price of some tickets. Though these scalpers handle less than 20% of the tickets, they are often the best tickets: the first 10 rows at an Elton John concert or the N.B.A. finals. They are the reason that even the fans who sleep outside the box office to be first in line find that they cannot buy a front-row seat. It is scalpers who bid up the price of a Rolling Stones ticket, for example, from $55 to $350. Typically, none of this end-stage profit goes to the performer, though a few bands are rumored to trade heavily with scalpers, holding back most of the best tickets from box-office sales. Ultimately, it’s the fans who pay for it all.
