Meanwhile, concert industry middlemen are showing little restraint: Their notorious service fees have escalated to as high as $9 per ticket. The result? While fans catch a break via some forward-thinking artists, their wallets are deftly picked before they ever stroll into an arena.

Why the disparity? According to promoters and building owners, the artists’ nightly take has become so large it leaves the middlemen scrambling for other ways to make money. In other words, service fees — originally created to cover the cost of placing a ticket order — have become a robust revenue stream.

“It’s a profit center,” explains one industry source. “Now they have an incentive to raise service fees.” The “they” here is SFX Entertainment, the concert industry behemoth that’s come to dominate the business over the past three years by snapping up most of the major summer amphitheaters (“sheds” as they’re known in the trade). SFX is promoting nearly 30 tours this year, including summer swings by Spears, KISS, Steely Dan and the George Strait Country Music Festival. By the end of the year, SFX will have its hand in over 3,000 shows. Meanwhile, SFX itself is in the process of merging with FM radio giant Clear Channel Communications in a $4 billion deal. So much for the concert business’ mom-and-pop days.

Industry talk suggests that when SFX and Ticketmaster struck a deal in late ’98, a deal in which SFX agreed not to challenge Ticketmaster by creating its own ticketing company, SFX was freed to pocket service fees above a certain level (around $4). Let’s put this in practical terms: For a sold-out Sting show that attracts 15,000 fans, a $7.50 per ticket service fee and a $3 facility fee lands SFX $100,000 long before the first note is played — or $6 beer sold. (Facility fees are exactly that: You pay for the honor of entering a venue. Some facilities now charge as much as $5.50 per customer. And no, that doesn’t always cover parking.)

A Ticketmaster spokesman had no comment. SFX’s senior vice president Mitch Slater confirms that his company’s cut of Ticketmaster’s service charge has become a helpful revenue source. But he insists, “There is a sense of responsibility not to charge ridiculous fees.”

Amid all this corporatization, some acts are bucking the trend. Though a $40 concert ticket is hardly a free pass, it’s a low price compared to other entertainment events. A brief list: Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game ($150); a road production of Disney’s “The Lion King” ($120); a preseason Los Angeles Lakers NBA game ($100); a New England Patriots football game ($75). After looking at this menu, a two-hour concert from a platinum-selling act stacks up pretty well. (Or, in the case of the Metallica/Korn/Kid Rock summer tour, three multiplatinum acts for $65.)

“These younger acts are all making a point of not letting prices get crazy,” says Phoenix promoter Danny Zelisko. “I hope they continue to do it because that means more people will come out to shows.”

If you’re looking for a poster band for this Summer of Love, look no further than Limp Bizkit. The aggro-rock band will launch a completely free, 10-city tour next week. Though the controversial music-swapping company Napster is picking up the $2 million tab (a move well worth the free press from Limp Bizkit’s decision), it’s hard to recall the last time a rock act at the top of its game comped its fans nationwide.

Still, much of the credit for the current bargain-basement craze goes to the pop stars over at Jive Records — the Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync and Spears — and the low ticket prices they’ve been setting for the past 12 months. With combined sales of more than 20 million CDs, the groups could literally charge whatever they want. “We could charge $150 for Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync, no problem,” says Mitch Slater at SFX, “because every parent wants to buy them for their kids.”

Despite their power, these acts have regularly gone out with $30 and $40 tickets. “Their business people are just being smart,” says Zelisko. With such a reasonable ticket, acts can return to the same market repeatedly and still do strong business. Another trick: “Those Jive acts sell their tickets so far in advance that by the time the show rolls around you forget you’ve spent the money,” says the Phoenix promoter. “So you’ll buy a T-shirt and key chain. Pretty soon it’s a $100 per-head night.”

That’s not to say the entire summer is on sale. Some baby boom favorites are still targeting Gold Card consumers. Sting, Tina Turner, Steely Dan, KISS, Neil Young, the Who and Don Henley are all flirting with $100 tickets. (Notable boomer exceptions include Jimmy Buffett, Santana and Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, who are getting from $50 to $70.) Diana Ross and the Supremes’ reunion tour is asking $250 for its best seats. (And more often than not, hearing “no” according to promoters.)

Yet compared to recent seasons, when tours by Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, Whitney Houston, Bette Midler, the Rolling Stones, Cher, Elton John and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all steamrolled the $100 mark (some recent CSN&Y tickets hit $200), this year’s lineup looks downright economical.

Just in time, too. According to the concert trade magazine Pollstar, the average ticket price rose an astounding 30 percent from ’98 to ’99, while overall attendance decreased. The business may have celebrated a $1.2 billion year in ’99, but it managed to lose customers.

But if some acts are conscientious enough to keep their ticket prices low, why do they tolerate runaway fees, which often add 30 to 50 percent onto the price of a ticket? After all, the tacked-on charges are spelled out in advance, so acts can’t claim ignorance.

Managers and promoters aren’t saying, but here’s the assumption: With artists pocketing such generous guarantees ($600,000 a night for KISS; $1 million for an ‘N Sync stadium show), they realize they need to cut the middlemen some slack. “They figure we can live with the fact that they’re getting facility and high service fees,” says one source, adding, “It’s curious why groups don’t go to Ticketmaster and say ‘I’m playing SFX buildings but I want to do things on my terms.’”

Then again, look at what happened to the last act that made a stink about ticket fees. Half a decade ago, with the band at the peak of its grunge power, Pearl Jam put service fees under the microscope, refusing to tour in venues that had exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Lead singer Eddie Vedder felt the company fleeced fans by charging indiscriminately high service fees, back when $5 per ticket was the usual ceiling. (“That seems like the Ice Age,” quips one touring pro.) Company officials responded that Ticketmaster worked in conjunction with building owners and promoters when it came to setting fees; Ticketmaster, which had to cover its operating costs, claimed to receive a relatively small portion of those revenues.

The band scrapped one tour; the following year it hired an upstart ticketing company called ETM, which charged roughly $3 service fees, and tried to bypass Ticketmaster’s established venues. But halfway through, bogged down in a logistical nightmare of routing a tour around established Ticketmaster venues and into parks and old racetracks (as well as Vedder’s health problems), the tour collapsed.

There’s no doubt who won that titanic battle: Five years later, Pearl Jam is preparing to kick off a new summer tour in August. It will be handled by Ticketmaster. What happened to ETM? The company announced last week that it was going out of business; Ticketmaster was buying up its assets.

Pearl Jam has not entirely lost its fighting spirit. The band will price tickets at $26 and $30, among the cheapest of any multiplatinum act in the country. But what about those bothersome fees? Let’s take the fan who buys a lawn seat for Pearl Jam’s Aug. 27 show at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York. He’ll face a $6.05 service fee, a $5.50 facility fee and a $3.50 handling fee. That $26 ticket suddenly costs $40.80 — a 56 percent increase over the ticket’s face value.

How about the Spears fan who snatched up a $22 lawn seat for the pop sensation’s June 21 show at Merriweather Post outside of Washington, D.C.? Tack on the $3 per ticket parking fee, the $7.50 per ticket service fee and Ticketmaster’s $3.25 handling fee (even though the tickets weren’t mailed out, but merely left at the venue’s will-call window), and that $22 ticket cost $35.55, a 59 percent increase.

Same goes for that $45 AC/DC ticket for the band’s Aug. 25 show at Madison Square Garden. It actually costs $59.25.

“And those are charges you must pay before you walk in the door,” points out one concert veteran. “As opposed to buying that Coke or T-shirt.”

For acts who aren’t working to keep ticket prices low, the service fees are head-turning. KISS at Irvine Meadows in California? $9.95 service fee per ticket. The Who at Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, Va.? $10.95 per ticket. Diana Ross and the Supremes at the National Car Rental Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.? $15 per ticket.

Of course there’s no reason it would cost Ticketmaster more money to spit out a $125 Who ticket than a $32 Creed ticket. But the industry’s unwritten rule has always been the higher the ticket price, the higher the service fee.

For now, at least, as the economy hums along and disposable income piles up, fees aren’t stopping anybody from getting to the shows. Says one source: “Nobody squawks.”

Thanks to Paula Abdul, the bar for speaking coherently as a judge has been set remarkably low. Paula was one of the original judges when “American Idol” began 10 years ago, and she made the jump with Cowell to “X Factor” last year, where she continued to vend her particular brand of addled kindness, never saying anything mean or insightful, and often saying it in spacey and strange ways. Spears is, of course, way more famous than Paula Abdul, and if she sits on the panel and says nice, meaningless things to the contestants each and every show, she will have earned her money. (It’s basically what the booted Nicole Scherzinger did all last season of “X Factor,” and just by virtue of being Britney Spears, Britney will be better at it.)

“X Factor” doesn’t need a hyper-articulate ballbuster to do this job and do it well. The time of sharp, critical insight on the singing shows — which initially seemed so crucial to “Idol’s” massive success — has passed. If viewers regularly lament how dull and plodding the judging rounds are now that even Cowell has tempered his honesty, “Idol” remains the biggest show on television with a judging panel that consists of Steven Tyler, Jennifer Lopez and Randy Jackson, a group as likely to insult a singer as call a newborn baby ugly.

But even if all that’s required of Spears is a season’s worth of banal compliments, that will add up to more sustained speaking than Spears has ever publicly done before. Rarely, if ever, has there been a person as famous as Britney Spears who talks so infrequently. Her most famous moments are all gestural — dancing in music videos, performing on the stage at some MTV awards show, shaving her head, bashing a window. Long before her breakdown, she displayed an uncanny tendency to speak in linguistic white noise, to say sentences that contained almost no content, just lots of y’alls and “you knows” and “oh my goshes” and a basic mood of sweetness, excitement, gratitude, eventually disconnect, and more recently, in her conservatorship years, anxiety and discomfort.

If this doesn’t make Spears a perfect judge for “X Factor” it should make her a perfect character for “X Factor.” The drama of Britney — how she will be, what she will say, and how she will hold up — is a story line at least as compelling as the one that will play out with the performers, if not far more so. We’ve been watching her for 13 years, not merely half a TV season. It’s possible “X Factor” will be as good for her career as “Idol” has been for Jennifer Lopez’s, but it’s more likely it will be uncomfortable and upsetting, a full season of watching a zonked-out Spears nervously navigate a live TV show. But we Americans owe Britney Spears a pension and worker’s comp for pain and suffering risked for our entertainment, and I’m happy a major corporation is paying it out (to the tune of $15 million). However “X-Factor” goes for Britney, I can’t wait to see what she says.

2. Britney Spears is a comedian now

The singer brings the gift of laughter (along with auto-tune) to her latest single “I Wanna Go.“  I’d tell her not to quit her day job, but she doesn’t have one.

3. “Footloose” remake gets a trailer

After Zac Efron took a pass on the film,  MTV hired unknown Kenny Wormald to fill Kevin Bacon’s loose shoes. His biggest advantage as far as I can tell is looking pretty much exactly like Zac Efron.

4. Watching the Internet is bad for the environment

Every time we use our computer, we unleash .2 grams of carbon dioxide into the air, according to this new video. Still less less harmful than cow farts, though.

5. Charlie Day stops by Fallon for “Long Pour” beer challenge

I will literally watch anything Charlie Day is in. This is why I now own two copies of “Going the Distance” and have already pre-ordered my tickets for “Horrible Bosses.”

But it’s 2011 and, as they say, Britney is back (bitch). She guest-starred in a “Glee”-themed episode revolving around her music, just purchased an $18.9 million mansion, and has released the first music video off her new “Femme Fatale” album, “Hold It Against Me.”

But just what are we looking at here?

So what’s going on here? An alien Britney falls to earth in a comet, but she spends the entire video inside of a metal room filled with wires, video feeds and Sony computers/televisions. In between rising above ground in a giant wedding dress with IV tubes plugged into her, Britney-alien-bot imagines a room where two other versions of herself are fighting. She goes and checks up on her PlentyofFish.com dating account. There’s a cute boy! Suddenly, paint sprays from the IV tubes, drenching the minions of dancers with no eye sockets who prance around her, waiting to get hired for a Lady Gaga video. All three Britneys (one in the room, two fighting in space) fall to the ground, spent after their paint ejaculation. But like Britney herself, these women-things are down but not beaten. They begin to rise once again and sing, as an angelic-looking Britney (circa 2003?) brings the world her message on a plasma screen.

Liz Kelly of the Washington Post called the video an “infomercial” for her own cosmetics brand, Make Up Forever, along with PlentyOfFish.com and Sony. But the first time around, I almost missed the makeup thing entirely. Sony is more indiscreetly placed. (Why would an alien mental patient — or whatever the hell she is — be using Sony?), while the PlentyOfFish shot doesn’t even make sense in the context of the video (which, to be fair, isn’t very coherent in the first place).

Still, it’s visually stunning, with a “Matrix” meets “The Cell” vibe that will have Lady Gaga wishing she had thought of IV paint drips first. If Britney’s metaphoric selves are actually duking it out in her brain as well as they are in this video, we can only assume that, for now at least, the good half has won out. 

The Max Martin- and Dr. Luke-produced song itself is quintessential Britney — all glitter and earworms and aggressive come-ons — and that’s obviously the point. After spending the better part of the last several years melting down, Spears likely doesn’t want to spring any surprises on her loyal fans. In the past decade, she’s been married twice, had two children, and done time in rehab and the psych ward. The woman has been to some dark places, and her very public failures and flubs are no doubt a huge part of her present success. Maybe another artist would choose to release some quasi-soul searching, been-through-the-fire and I’m-a-survivor empowerment anthem for her return, but Spears didn’t get famous for her pop gravitas. She knows what her audience wants: They want dancing with a snake at the VMAs Britney, not dead behind the eyes, missing her cues at the VMAs Britney. They want her blond, they want her horny, and they definitely want her head unshaved. Come to think of it, even people who aren’t her fans would likely prefer her that way. And by God, that is what she will give them.

But things have changed around the old place since you went away, Britney. There’s always room on the charts for a singer who can offer a few dance hooks in a girl-gone-wild package, but really, Ke$ha’s picked up that baton pretty nicely. In the meantime, Lady Gaga has almost single-handedly reinvented the blonde dance beast aesthetic, proving that a catchy tune, a degree of musical virtuosity, and a bold artistic vision are not all mutually exclusive. As a colleague mused recently, Britney after Gaga is like going back to the greatest bar in your midsize hometown after a year in Manhattan. It’s still comfortable; it just doesn’t seem as eye-popping.

Everybody loves a comeback, and while Britney has had a long and often humiliating road to come back from, she’s made a concerted and often shrewd effort not to detour from it over the past year. She’s managed to dominate Twitter,  amassing millions of followers with her innocuous observations. (She — or her Twitter handler — may not be as entertaining as Kanye, but she’s not as unhinged as Courtney Love either.) She cheekily whet the public appetite for her charms via last fall’s Britney-themed episode of “Glee,” a greatest hits package of her most memorable video moments repurposed for a new generation.

Yet as she seductively claws her way up the Billboard chart this week, leaving her stiletto footprints on Katy Perry and Pink, it’s hard not to question how classic Britney will ultimately hold up in the crowded field of pop tarts. There are worse fates that could befall a woman who’s seen such hard times than to stage a sales-shattering triumph. And she could keep pumping out coolly efficient disco beats from now until the apocalypse. When her new album releases next week, however, wouldn’t it be encouraging if it displayed even a whiff of Kanye-level introspection, of Gaga-caliber risk? She’s still the hot blonde. But as she veers toward 30, she can’t keep partying like it’s 2001 forever. And her career longevity depends on being the woman who doesn’t just ask the world to “Gimme More,” but shows her fans she’s learned she can bestow something more.

But the princess of pop isn’t the show’s only famous fan: Sir Paul McCartney also wants in. “I was gob-smacked,” Murphy remembers after receiving a note from McCartney along with two CDs full of classic songs the rock ‘n’ roll legend wished to hear on the show.

Unfortunately, neither Spears nor McCartney are scheduled to appear on the show. But fret not about the lack of star power — that’s where Susan Boyle comes in. The bestselling pop singer, who gained popularity after appearing on “Britain’s Got Talent,” will be playing a high school lunch lady in a Christmas-themed episode. Which is convenient since it was announced last week that Boyle will be releasing a Christmas album later in the year.

The second season of “Glee” premieres Sept. 21.