Billy Joel’s Hamptons Show: A Flop Or A Celebrity-Subsidized Flop?

It’s always fun when factions of Rupert Murdoch’s empire go into battle over important issues–like the Social@Ross $15,000-a-five-pack concert series, which has had some deep discounts available lately. This weekend’s headliner was Billy Joel, and according to yesterday’s New York Post, ticket sales for the show were slow enough to give promoter Joe Meli a heart attack-ack-ack:

With tickets barely moving, Meli – tail between his legs – is now offering a “limited” number of tickets to the final three shows of his series, called the Hampton Social.

“It’s not too late, you can still attend the 2007 Hampton Social,” he wrote in an e-mail to potential subscribers. “If you have not purchased your tickets, now is the time.”

Word around the Hamptons is that Meli has been giving away lots of free tickets, to make it appear that his concerts are popular.

Au contraire! roared Fox News mouthpiece Roger Friedman, who’s been serving as a sort of Personality Parade for these concerts all summer when he hasn’t been offering up Clive Davis’ side of the Kelly Clarkson saga. In a piece that unfortunately referred to Joel as a hometown boy for “the east end of Long Island”–ahem–Friedman gave a different take on the night’s gate:

Show insiders tell me that offering the whole thing up front as a $30,000-a-couple series was too much even for the Hamptons. Sales were slow. But now, individual shows are being sold, and Joel’s was so hot that 200 more seats than the 1,000 allotted for where actually sold.

“We had 1,200 people,” said a source. Another source says that Joel was paid $2 million for the night.

Of course, among those “1,200 people” were a lot of boldface names–the type who live on the largesse of places like the Polaroid Beach House. (When David Blaine is “walking around doing card tricks,” you know that you’re living in some province of Swagland.) So yeah, Meli probably took a total bath on this, finance-wise, although his baby sure did rack up a lot of blog hits over the weekend. Who wants to put money on there being a sequel to this fiasco next year–only with higher ticket prices and more sponsors, so the celebs can keep their weekend calendars filled and Meli can look like he’s saving face?

HAMPTONS’ CONCERT TIX NIXED [NYP] Fox411 [foxnews.com] [Photo: Getty Images]