Days of markups coming to end?

If everything is on sale, maybe the starting price is too high?

You won’t get a discount for Garth Brooks. For all other shows in town, look around. If you didn’t know they all have deals, I just told you.

If you can’t pay less money for hotter tickets such as Terry Fator, you can at least get a room combo or a better seat: “Free upgrade to VIP seating!” is a ubiquitous come-on now.

Some alliances are specific. Blue Man Group offers “red zone seating” through Allegiant Air. “The Lion King” e-mails discount offers to people who signed up for Disneyland promotions.

Others are right there on the host casino’s home page. My favorite? The “Lil Bit Rock ‘n’ Roll” package for Dancin’ Donny Osmond (and sister Marie), because it throws in a Donny dog tag.

The trend even spreads to room-and-show combos for concerts such as Britney Spears and Rod Stewart. And did you ever pay full price for a House of Blues act and later get the e-mail for a “two-for-one ticket day”?

Why not just stop all this foolishness and lower prices?

The short-term answers:

A. Producers are trying to preserve prices for the day the recession ends.

B. Some sucker always walks up at the last minute and pays full freight.

But long term? The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to marking ’em up to mark ’em down.

“Legends in Concert” cost $34.50 in October 2002, when the first same-day discount booth arrived. Now it averages $60, in part to get the 2002 price at the half-price booths.

What are you gonna do? Run all the discounters out of town?

Not a bad idea, says producer/hypnotist Anthony Cools. “I will challenge all the other shows. I’m done playing the game,” he says. “I’m going to be pulling myself from the two-for-one game when my contract expires in February, and I challenge everyone else to do the same.”

Producer David Saxe has proposed a producers league. “It’s frustrating now because the brokers are telling the producers how it’s going to work. They’re very much in the driver’s seat,” he says.

Others don’t trust Saxe because of his own high commissions for brokers. “If I can get everybody to be a unified team first, then we can work on our own differences,” he argues.

Getting producers to agree on, say, a standard ticket commission would be like getting Democrats and Republicans to agree on health care. But a producer can dream, can’t he?

“Just the fact that we would exist (as an organization) would scare the brokers who are trying to bully us,” Saxe says.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.