Ticket Costs Soar Under New Plan : Pop music: Using the ‘house scaling’ system, many venues are sharply boosting the prices of the best seats at concerts.

How much is a live performance of “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” worth on the free market?

It depends on where you sit and in what city.

If you’re planning to catch the show at the Universal Amphitheatre on June 20, 21 or 22, tickets are going for $32.50. But if you take in the same show at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on June 23 or 24, the price of a seat can reach as high as $252.25.

How can two venues charge such radically different prices for the same show over a span of only a few days?

For years, concertgoers have blamed soaring ticket costs on scalpers and brokers--the latter being middlemen who legally buy and resell tickets for as much as 20 times their face value. Brokers are charging about $80 for good seats at the Universal show and about $250 for the show at Irvine, but in this case they aren’t responsible for pushing up ticket prices.

Hefty tickets prices at the Lloyd Webber shows in Irvine are the result of a new box-office seating arrangement called “scaling the house”--in which artists authorize promoters to charge consumers higher prices for prime seat locations. It puts artists and promoters in the same price league as scalpers and brokers.

“When we put on the (Rolling) Stones show (in Los Angeles) a while back, I heard that the fans were paying the scalpers $1,000 for front-row tickets,” said Peter Luukko, regional vice president of Spectacor Management Group, a Philadelphia-based company that produces about 750 concerts annually across the nation. “What makes anyone think they won’t pay promoters the same thing?”

Major artists working the concert circuit command much higher fees than ever before. As a result, competitive bidding for top name acts has driven up the cost of doing business. Some industry observers suggest that scaling the house, in tandem with corporate sponsorship, provides promoters with additional revenue to help defray spiraling tour costs in the midst of a recession.

Ron Weisner, Steve Winwood’s manager, views house scaling as a new tool to help promoters cope during tough times.

“My feeling is that this is a traumatic transitional period in the concert business,” said Weisner, who consented to scale about 15% of the 55 dates on Winwood’s national tour this spring. “Expenses continue to rise and the profit margin for promoters keeps dropping. Scaling the house is a way to help promoters circumvent scalping and get the best seats to the fans.”

Still, some pop stars are not comfortable with the practice. Dance diva Paula Abdul, who is scheduled to embark on an international tour in September, has decided not to allow promoters to scale the house at any of her upcoming concerts.

“I’m sure we could probably charge a lot more for the tickets than we intend to,” Abdul’s manager, Larry Tollin, said. “If I were managing Frank Sinatra, maybe I could understand it. He has a different kind of audience with a much higher level of disposable income. But with an artist like Paula, the demographic of her audience is much younger. At this point in her career, I just don’t think it would be fair or equitable to Paula’s fans if we were to scale the house.”

Once commonly employed at reserved-seat rock shows throughout the ‘60s, scaled seating arrangements disappeared from the more youthful pop scene when promoters introduced the general admission ticket in the mid-’70s.

And while it may seem like a new development to pop audiences, scaling has long dominated seating arrangements in other fields, such as classical music, theater and sports. For years, fans have been paying promoters big bucks for ringside seats at boxing matches and other athletic events. Some Laker fans, for instance, pay the Forum as much as $450 per game to obtain choice seats.

Winwood and Yes broke the pop scaling barrier earlier this month by selling $50 “golden circle” tickets for seats in the front of the house at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa and at the Forum in Inglewood. Promoters also intend to scale the house for upcoming Los Angeles shows by Gloria Estefan, Sting and Paul Simon.

Officials of Avalon Attractions, the company promoting the scaled-house Lloyd Webber dates at Irvine Meadows, could not be reached for comment. But promoter Bill Silva, whose San Diego-based promotion firm plans to scale the house with $45 prime seat locations at upcoming Sting and Paul Simon shows at the Hollywood Bowl, thinks house scaling is a concept long overdue.

“For all the bashing that ticket brokers have taken over the years, one thing they have proven to our industry is that fans are willing to pay a greater premium for our product than we have been placing on it ourselves,” Silva said.

Carl Freed, executive director of the New York-based North American Concert Promoters Assn. (NACPA), which represents most of the nation’s major promoters, predicted that house-scaled seating arrangements are destined to become the blueprint for pop concerts in the ‘90s.

“It’s happening all over the country,” Freed said. “Everybody knows that tickets to pop music concerts have been undervalued for years. But up until recently, artists have been reluctant to raise prices. They thought it might seem elitist.”

Is it?

Not according to most promoters. The formula, they say, is built on a sliding scale designed to accommodate fans from all income levels. The theory holds that as the price for the best seats goes up, the price for the worst seats should come down proportionately. But in practice, most acknowledge that ticket prices for undesirable seats rarely drop much, if at all.

Another idiosyncrasy of the system is that the price of the best seats can vary from city to city. Front-row seats for a Yes concert scheduled next week in Cincinnati at the Riverfront Coliseum cost $35. Prime seats for the Yes concert two weeks ago at the Forum in Inglewood went for $50.

“It all comes down to supply and demand,” said John Nath, vice president and general manager of the Cincinnati Riverfront Coliseum. “The market is different in the Midwest than on the East or the West coast.”

Ironically, most of the highest-priced seats at both Lloyd Webber concert sites sold out first, as did the $50 golden circle front-row seats for recent house-scaled concerts staged by Yes and Winwood earlier this month at the Forum in Inglewood. Golden circle seats--selling at $40 a pop--for Gloria Estefan’s July 26 Forum show also sold out immediately.

But how high can pop ticket prices go before a consumer backlash begins?

Claire L. Rothman, general manager of the Forum, estimated that few rock fans would tolerate scaled-house ticket prices exceeding $100. San Diego promoter Silva agreed, adding that the slope of a concert’s scale should be determined by the demographic makeup of the audience.

“Sting and Paul Simon might support a $50 or $75 ticket, but an Aerosmith crowd may, theoretically speaking, have a threshold of about $37.50,” Silva said. “Barring inflation, I can’t see any way that prices for rock shows will hit $100.”

“No one wants the price of rock events to end up like sports,” said Spectacor’s Peter Luukko said. “I certainly am not in favor of seeing this turn into a two-tier system. But realistically, the possibility does exist.”

Concern over the unavailability of affordable good seats at pop music events caused California Senate Judiciary Committee leader Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) to introduce a stringent ticket-scalping bill last month aimed at putting brokers--those who buy and resell tickets for a profit--out of business.

Many promoters and managers believe that house scaling offers the industry a more realistic approach to eliminate scalping and ticket brokering.

“Everybody knows that the best seats often end up in the hands of the brokers and the scalpers,” NACPA’s Carl Freed said. “By raising the price of the ticket, we can cut them out and put the money back into the proper pockets.”

Fred Ross, owner of Front Row Center Tickets and secretary treasurer of the California Assn. of Ticket Agencies, agreed.

“It’s true,” Ross said. “If promoters keep jacking up the face value on the best seats, guys like me, who buy and resell tickets for a living, may end up getting elbowed out of the market.”

But Rothman, who debuted house scaling two weeks ago at the Forum, doubts whether the practice will put much of a dent in either the scalping or the ticket-brokering market.

Said Rothman, “Any fan who pays lots of money for a $35 seat will only want it more if it costs $100.”