Bruce Springsteen still has box-office clout.

His summer stadium-level tour with the E Street Band has included a 10-show run at New Jersey's Giants Stadium and four Boston dates. He's announced three shows at New York's Shea Stadium.
With those shows, fans' demand for the opening dates spurred the addition of extra shows.

But things are different in Denver, and it's not just the altitude.

As of Wednesday, only 25,000 tickets had been sold for Springsteen's gig at Invesco Field at Mile High on Thursday night. In Denver, it looks like he'll play in a stadium with a host of fans disguised as 40,000 empty seats.

Which raises the question: To paper or not to paper? In the entertainment business, "papering the house" - giving away a cascade of free tickets to a concert to ensure a capacity audience - is acceptable. Artificially boosting the turnout seems like a dandy deal, unless you're one of the saps paying retail for concert tickets.

"Going to a concert now is like airline travel," said Mark Bliesener, a Denver-based music industry consultant.
"On a plane, you may be sitting right next to someone who paid $189 for a seat that you paid $550 for. At a concert, you may have paid $59 for your ticket, and the person next to you got it free at ArtReach."

This summer, piles of free concert tickets have sat on counters at Denver retailer stores. This in a city which was the nation's top per-capita concert market in the '70s and '80s.

Now promoters are reduced to begging people to go to shows.

"I've never seen so many shows given away in my life, by every promoter in town," said Bob Rupp, longtime owner of Rupp's Drums. "In the old days, everything was sold. They never papered shows. They didn't need to."

"This year, we were giving out tickets like crazy," said Jesse Lint, owner of Send 'Em Packing, a packaging and shipping store. "At any time, we had several hundred tickets for Fiddler's Green. ZZ Top, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Steely Dan, B.B. King - I can't even list them all. There were tickets for Red Rocks, smaller venues like the Ogden Theatre and the Bluebird Theater.

"We just take them and put them out on the counter," he said. "Whoever wants them, it's free. We're just like Ticketmaster, but friendlier."

Papering is not a new concept. The practice is decades old.

"When you have a show that has not sold well, and the decision is made to go forward with it - in other words, the artist wants to do the show rather than cancel - it's in everybody's best interest to get as many people in the house as possible," said Gary Bongiovanni of Pollstar, a trade magazine.

But the last two summers rank as some of the poorest ever for rock shows. Concert tours generated less revenue nationwide. Attendance dropped.

Denver was the worst of the worst. Local rock-show honchos fretted about an uncertain economy and talent-saturated calendar.

"We're just starting to see the effect of too many bands on the road, ticket prices being too high," Bliesener said. "Music is not the be-all and end-all it once was. It's not sparking the audiences to go to six or eight shows a summer.

"Everything is changing, up for grabs," he said. "In previous years, you could depend on 'walk-up.' On the night of a show, a certain number of people were going to walk up and buy tickets. This year, the walk-ups seemed to dry up. So it became a necessary evil to paper the house."

"You may be seeing more of it because there are more shows in need of it," Bongiovanni added. "The economy certainly has not been that great. Usually you find papering more in the outdoor shows where they have relatively little difficulty selling most of the reserved seats, but the lawn seats go begging. So you have this giant empty (space) out there. And those are the ones to give away.

"It's a difficult thing for promoters to do, because you don't want get your local audience dependent on getting free tickets," he said. "Then, what's their motivation to buy them?"

There are legitimate reasons to paper the house. Promoters who own buildings increase the ancillary revenue, making more money on parking and beer sales.

But it's mostly about aesthetics.

"The artist feels slighted if they're playing to this sea of empty seats," Bongiovanni said. "It looks embarrassing. They feel better playing to a big crowd, even if they are not getting paid on those extra bodies.
"It makes the experience feel more rewarding from the audience standpoint as well," he said. "There's nothing worse than being one of 2,000 people in a 15,000-seat place. Those who bought tickets feel like they made a mistake. 'Why am I here and nobody else is?"'

Ideally, Bongiovanni said, promoters use radio giveaways or other creative methods where they can garner some promotional value.

Jim McCue is the newly appointed local chief of House of Blues, which owns and operates Fiddler's Green.
"I can't speak to this summer, because I wasn't here," he said. "But in industry terms, a lot of tickets are often put out to sponsors and other associated companies as a gesture of goodwill."

But there's nothing subtle about dropping a stack of free tickets on the counter at Twist & Shout.

"It's sampling," McCue said with a nervous laugh.

Creative giveaways can be hard to pull off, Bongiovanni said. "If you're talking about trying to give away thousands of tickets, it's no easy proposition," he said.

There was a good house for Mariah Carey's performance at Red Rocks, due mainly to papering: 3,500 seats were sold, yet the 9,000-seat venue looked nearly full. Ringo Starr's show at Universal Lending Pavilon was papered; the ex-Beatle struggled to sell tickets.

Papering seats to make it appear that the concert industry is still financially robust is risky business for promoters. Chuck Morris, who heads Clear Channel Entertainment locally, says the policy will surely implode in the future.

"I feel like giving away an outrageous amount of free tickets kills the golden goose, if you call this tough business a golden goose," said the 30-year industry veteran. "We're in the business of selling tickets, not giving them away. You're diluting your product.

"There's a point where you hurt yourself and hurt the acts and hurt the whole business," Morris said. "I think it's at that point. How does anybody sell tickets when the same kind of act is being given away free?"

For an industry so dependent on ticket receipts to turn a profit, maybe promoters shouldn't be so eager to unload their product.

"Some girl came in last week and said, 'I'm just checking to see what tickets you have,"' Lint recalled. "I didn't have any more because it's the end of the concert season. She left her number and said, 'Will you please call me if you get any more?'

"It makes you wonder," he said. "You have Bruce Springsteen tickets for $79 and people giving away ZZ Top and Mariah Carey for free. Are these guys not able to sell?"

It can make for awkward situations in the industry.

"Most of the drummers who come by my store and hang out are friends," Rupp said. "Rikki Rockett of Poison came by, and I must have had 300 tickets on my desk to give away for that show at Fiddler's Green. Out of respect, I took them off. He didn't need to see that. All he was going to see that night was 15,000 people."

Yet Bongiovanni notes that artists are involved in the decision to paper the house, since most concert contracts involve percentage payments.

"If you give away 2,000 tickets, those have to be accounted for," he said. "You have to be able to prove that they were given away and with the band's consent. Otherwise you have to pay the band on them."

Springsteen's summer run might not be well-attended in Denver, but it probably won't be as lonely at Invesco Field as it will be at Coors Field for a game between the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks.

"Too bad his concert's not at Coors Field," Bongiovanni said. "Bruce is playing a lot of major-league baseball parks on the tour, in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, San Francisco. Rather than the 60,000-80,000 seat football stadiums, they're the 30,000-40,000 seat baseball parks.

"I don't think there are a lot of people crowing about how great business was this summer," he said. "There are some acts that do well, and then there are others that just mystify people and don't sell any tickets. And it's hard to predict what they're going to be."