Bob Grossweiner and Jane Cohen report: The $100 concert ticket price is here and will probably stay for a long time. Rod Stewart recently played Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford, Conn., where tickets were priced at $150, $125, $75 and $45, and sold out within a day. When Neil Young performs at The Theatre at Madison Square Garden in New York on April 19, 21-22, tickets are scaled at $150, $100, $75 and $45, and when Brian Wilson plays at New York's Beacon Theatre June 18, tickets are priced at $100, $65, $50 and $35.

Then you have the Rolling Stones, who commanded up to $400 a ticket for their indoor shows in 1999. And don't forget the numerous planned shows to mark the millennium (which begins in the year 2001, but will be celebrated by many as calendars hit the year 2000). Millenium-marketed events will undoubtedly carry the highest average ticket prices in history for contemporary music.

Concert promoters have surveyed people going to their shows for years and found those in the first 10 rows often bought their tickets from scalpers rather than at the box office and were paying over $100 for the tickets that were originally priced at less than half of what the concert fan eventually paid.

Since the artists don't share in the scalped portion of the ticket, managers, acts and promoters have, in many cases, opted to raise the average price of tickets so that those entities involved in the shows (ie, promoters, mgrs, acts, etc) could benefit from what the public was willing to pay.

In many cases, acts and promoters are balancing the shift to higher-priced tickets near the stage with a drop in ticket pricing for seats at the rear of the arena, or in the lawn at outdoor amphitheatres. While prices in the first ten rows hit record highs even in 1998, lawns seats dipped in many cases as low as $10-$15.

While lawn and upper-level pricing is expected to remain somewhat reasonable for the upcoming concert season, industry watchers continue to eye the action in the front, where scalpers continue to buy tickets at current $100 to $150 prices and resell them at an even higher values, particularly for baby-boomer reunion tours.

One concert promoter told Live Daily that he and his colleagues are carefully looking at audiences to see whether or not they're paying a higher price than ticket face values in the $150 range, suggesting that a healthy clip of after-market sales activity in this price range may portend a move into even higher territory during the coming concert season.