Britney's Bad Knee a Costly Proposition

By Stephen M. Silverman

06/21/2004 at 08:00 AM EDT

When Britney Spears blew out her knee shooting a music video, the plug got pulled on the remaining 37 performances of her Onyx Hotel Tour, leaving several concert venue directors in the lurch – and costing the pop princess $750,000 to $1 million a night in guaranteed fees from concert promoters, PEOPLE reports in its current issue.

That amount includes her share of ticket revenue, plus a cut from the sale of merchandise like those pink "Toxic" baby-doll shirts.

"We had 48 hours to put a package together so we could sell tickets in enough time," Bob Babisch, entertainment director of Milwaukee's Summerfest, tells The New York Times after it was left with a Britney void and 23,000 seats to fill. Stepping in for Spears: The Steve Miller and the Bodeans.

As for Spears's cancellation, Babisch deadpanned: "It keeps things interesting, I'll say that."

Clear Channel Communications, which was promoting Britney's tour, would not respond to such questions as who will pay for the losses incurred by the show's cancellation.

During the first U.S. leg of Spears's tour this spring, "she was attracting almost 12,000 people a city," Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of the concert-industry publication Pollstar, tells PEOPLE. "When you're selling those kinds of numbers, you're profitable."

Even taking into account the costs of the production that Spears would have paid, from bus rentals to her dancers' meals, the lost potential income is "significant – tens of millions of dollars," says Billboard senior writer Ray Waddell. "She would have been one of the top-grossing tours of the year had she played it out."