Rarefied Open Air : Concert Tickets at SDSU Venue Are Going for Anything but a Song

Pop music fans buying tickets to shows at the Open Air Theatre at San Diego State University are paying the highest prices in the nation for summer concerts, according to industry promoters and a survey conducted by The Times.

In some cases, prices at the Open Air Theatre are almost twice that of the Shoreline Amphitheatre in the San Francisco Bay area, Starplex Amphitheatre in Dallas or even the famous Radio City Music Hall in New York and Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.

Compared with various arena prices around the country, tickets at the Open Air Theatre were the highest in what promoters define as categories for concert audiences--young professional (or “yuppie”), hard rock and heavy metal/teen-age.

An example of a young professional draw would be Jimmy Buffett or Jackson Browne, both of whom are in the theater’s summer lineup. A hard-rock example is Tom Petty, who will play at SDSU this summer, as will Great White, a heavy-metal favorite of teen-agers.

The theater’s top price for Buffett and Petty is $36.50, not counting the service charge tacked on by the regional ticket agency, Ticketmaster. A spokeswoman for the agency said that 80% of all tickets are bought through Ticketmaster.

For orders taken over the phone, Ticketmaster adds a service charge of $4.50 a ticket. By buying from a Ticketmaster outlet, the service charge varies from 50 cents to $4.50. The only way to avoid the charge for events at the Open Air Theatre is to buy over the counter at the Aztec Center Box Office at SDSU.

“Say you buy a couple of tickets to Petty,” said local rock promoter Bill Silva. “With the $4.50 service charge, that’s $41 a ticket. Throw in a couple of T-shirts, a drink or two, dinner before the show, and you’re up to $150 for a date.”

Of course, Silva may have an ax to grind. Earlier this year, he lost out to rival promoter Avalon Attractions for the exclusive contract to host acts over a 20-year period at both the Open Air Theatre and a 13,000-seat sports arena planned for SDSU.

Avalon scored the rights by paying $4 million up front. Silva maintains that rock fans are subsidizing the deal in ticket prices.

“It’s like a leveraged buyout in business, when a company assumes a great deal of debt,” he said. “To make good on the deal, Avalon has to pocket a lot of money just to meet the obligation. So the cost is passed on--to the consumer.”

Moss Jacobs, general manager for Avalon, which is based in Los Angeles, said the reasons for high ticket prices are “complex and various.”

He said the multimillion-dollar down payment for exclusivity was “no factor,” and he attributed the high prices to the theater’s size, the “superstar quality” of the acts Avalon books and to San Diego’s “longstanding rap” as an outpost for rock.

“We don’t set those prices artificially,” Jacobs said. “They’re a result of the costs we’re putting in. The economics of bringing big-name talent to San Diego demands a lot of money. We as promoters work hard to make ticket prices as low as possible.

“I wish that we could lower ticket prices. But if we had to pay less, we wouldn’t have the acts. . . . I haven’t heard anyone complain.”

Jay Thomas, who runs the Open Air Theatre for SDSU’s Associated Students, said the venue’s top ticket prices are somewhat misleading.

Higher Across the Board

He said that only 423 seats for Petty’s appearances July 25-26 are being sold at $36.50, and that 1,406 are being sold at $29 and 2,806 at $26.50, excluding any surcharge by Ticketmaster. A similar range is in effect for Browne, Great White and others, he said. The Open Air Theatre seats 4,385; the remaining tickets are being sold for standing room only.

Still, the range of prices at the Open Air Theatre came out higher, across the board, than at any major hall from San Diego to New York. Petty’s shows at the 6,251-seat Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles pull a top price of $20. Top price for Petty is $20 at Starplex Amphitheatre in Dallas, and $18.50 at both The Summit in Houston and the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, near San Jose. Lower-priced tickets are available at each location.

Tickets for Jackson Browne’s show at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan went for between $20 and $25. At SDSU, prices for Browne’s Aug. 27 show fall between $20 for standing room and $31.50 for “pit” seats at, not counting the service charge. Browne can be heard for $20 and less in Dallas and Los Angeles and for $18.50 and less in the Bay area. He can be heard at the Austin, Tex., Aquafestival for a top price of $6 a ticket.

“The horror in all this is the horrendous overcharging going on this summer for the Tom Petty shows,” Silva said. “Petty is a hard-rock artist, not a yuppie artist, and so he appeals to more of a working-class clientele. They’re charging more for him than they are for either Jackson Browne or Jimmy Buffett, who appeal to more of a yuppie crowd. It’s ridiculous.”

As president of Bill Silva Presents, Silva has booked the Starlight Bowl summer appearances by Bob Dylan (with a top price of $27.50 a ticket) and a double bill of jazzman Robert Cray and bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan at a peak of $24 a ticket. Avalon frequently cites the size of the Open Air Theatre as the reason for escalating prices, but Silva said Starlight Bowl is only seven seats bigger at a capacity of 4,392.

Jay Thomas, SDSU’s manager of the Open Air Theatre, said the setting of prices “reflects largely what the market will bear, but most of it is artists’ fees.” Promoters bid on individual artists, and usually, but not always, he said, the high bidder wins. He said Avalon was attractive to SDSU because of its strength in booking acts into Los Angeles and Orange County.

Some acts “agreed to play San Diego as part of a package deal that included L. A. and Orange County,” he said.

Still Considered Secondary

Despite the fact that San Diego is the seventh-largest city in the country, Thomas said it remains “a secondary, not a primary” market and that ticket prices must compensate.

But that argument loses strength when looking at the out-of-the-way places many rockers play during the summer. Is San Diego less attractive a venue than Fairbanks, Alaska, or Tyler, Tex., where ticket prices for many of the same acts are lower?

Browne, Willie Nelson, Bruce Cockburn, Neil Young and Timbuk 3 are booked for the Paha Sapa Music Festival in Rapid City, S. D., where the price range falls between $15 and $20 a ticket. Tom Petty has dates scheduled for St. Petersburg, Fla., and Sacramento; Jimmy Buffett will play Holmdel, N. J., and Birmingham, Ala., and those markets presumably are smaller than San Diego.

SDSU’s Thomas argued that “it all has to do with the size of the venue” and said the Open Air Theatre is one of the smallest in the country. He maintained that what a rock fan loses in cost at the theater he gains in “almost perfect sight lines” and “some of the best acoustics in the world.”

“Browne and Petty are doing multiple dates in L. A., and we usually don’t have the luxury of those here,” said Moss Jacobs of Avalon. “In L. A., you have an amphitheater where, with three dates, you have the gross potential of 18,000 people paying $20 each to afford a band. The band usually wants the same amount of money to play San Diego--for one date, two at the most, at fewer than 5,000 seats--so you see what we’re up against. In some cases, the artists want more than it’s possible to pay. Last year, our top ticket for both Sade and Crosby, Stills and Nash was $50. We can’t go much higher than that.

“Here’s the formula we go by: We evaluate what the artist will draw in the market, balanced against what the artist expects for payment,” Jacobs said. “The result of all that is the ticket price. If we had to pay less, we couldn’t get the acts. It’s as simple as that.”

COMPARING TICKET PRICES

Seating Young Concert Site Capacity Professional Hard Rock Brendan Byrne Arena, 20,800 $18.50 $23.50 East Rutherford, N.J. Jackson The Who Browne Irvine Meadows 15,000 $24.50 $26.50 Amphitheatre, Elvis Costello Laguna Hills Radio City 6,000 $25 $22.50 Music Hall, 10,000 Maniacs New York San Diego 4,835 $31.50 $36.50 State University Tom Petty Open Air Theatre Shoreline 20,000 $18.50 $18.50 Amphitheatre, Mountain View, Calif. Starplex 20,000 $20 $20 Amphitheatre, Dallas Universal 6,251 $23.50 $20 Amphitheatre, Los Angeles

Heavy Metal/ Concert Site Teen-Age Brendan Byrne Arena, $20 East Rutherford, N.J. Ozzie Osborne Irvine Meadows $22 Amphitheatre, Great White Laguna Hills Radio City $18 Music Hall, Violent Femmes New York San Diego $24 State University Great White Open Air Theatre Shoreline $19.50 Amphitheatre, Bon Jovi Mountain View, Calif. Starplex $20.50 Amphitheatre, Dallas Universal $20 Amphitheatre, L.L. Cool J Los Angeles

AN UPWARD SPIRAL

Concert prices have been steadily rising throughout San Diego. Calendar.