Dan Fraser, manager of Canadian folk-pop act Barenaked Ladies, said he asked the promoters handling each date of the band's North American tour to lower the facility fee on the cheapest tickets.

Clear Channel's tour division refused to budge on lowering the fees at 18 tour dates where the band requested it, Fraser said. House of Blues, which is promoting the band's appearances at six venues, agreed to trim $2 off the price of the cheapest tickets at five of them, he said.

For the band's Aug. 14 concert at Clear Channel's venue in Irvine, a ticket with a face value of $14.25 will cost $29.70 to purchase by phone or online.

"They're making more money [in fees] than they are on the concert ticket," Fraser said. "There's nobody that controls that. I can't say, 'Hey, you're charging too much.' They won't even talk to you about it."

Clear Channel and other concert firms say that, because artists on the tour circuit these days are demanding a bigger slice of concert profits, promoters and building owners have been forced to devise new revenue streams to keep up their profit margins.

Ironically, booking agents and rival promoters say, Clear Channel is largely to blame for rising artist fees. The company offers artists huge premiums, they say, to secure control over an act's entire tour instead of competing with other firms for individual dates.

"They've been the ones propelling the costs upward," said John Marx, senior vice president of contemporary music at the William Morris agency. "They've done so as an attempt to really corner the market, to run out the competition. They just come in with astoundingly big guarantees."

Eckerman said his company paid bands appropriately considering their increasing production costs.

"We would like to pay the lowest guarantees possible," he said.

As for ticket prices, Eckerman said, further increases are hard to predict. "We live in a supply-and-demand economy." This would certainly imply that consolidation under Clear Channel is having more of an impact on prices than Krueger allowed, with built-in venue fees padding the ticket price markedly.

On the download side of the argument, JOHN VON SEGGERN, postgraduate researcher in postdigital music, has some fascinating insight into the process:

MUSIC FILE-SHARING: IMPACTS ON THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Abstract: This brief paper is a summary of recent research on music file-sharing conducted by the international recording industry as well as a number of independent Internet research firms. Briefly stated, although the industry has blamed online file-sharing for recent drops in CD sales, independent researchers have consistently found a more mixed picture of file-sharing's effects, with an overall upward bias; that is, music file-sharing on the Internet has been consistently found to actually increase the average amount of money which users spend on purchasing music.

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