On Tuesday, Bruce Springsteen became a news item without actually doing anything, let alone setting foot in Finland.

   

The news of his June 2003 appearance in the Olympic Stadium already created ripples some weeks ago; Springsteen has never played in Finland before now, despite several visits to Sweden. When tickets finally went on sale on Tuesday, the residents of Helsinki (and elsewhere) set off in vast numbers, either to queue at the ticket offices or to dial, redial, and redial the busy phone lines, or even to book online (though it appears this last ploy might have been a miscalculation).

   

From early in the morning people started to form lines in front of the Lippupalvelu ticket service outlets around the city. Simultaneously, tickets were sold over the phone and through the Internet at such rate that the entire lot of 44,000 seats and general admission tickets were gone in just three hours.

   

Risto Juvonen, the managing director of Welldone, the Finnish promoters of the concert, was extremely satisfied with the sales, but said the huge demand for tickets still came as a shock.

The Lippupalvelu CEO, Harri Kaasinen

, believed the Helsinki Olympic Stadium sold out in record time. Just one slip temporarily slowed down the sales: the system got jammed for 20 minutes.

   

"The system didn't crash. It was merely a human error by one of the employees. Access to our Internet site was limited on purpose. Otherwise all the tickets would have sold out in less than an hour. We just wanted to make sure there were tickets left for all the outlets as well."

   

Sales were restricted to 12 tickets per customer. According to Juvonen, this applied to companies as well. The rumour that 75% of the tickets would have been sold in advance to corporate clients is untrue, he claimed. Juvonen emphasises that the concert's co-sponsors and partners received exactly 420 tickets and no more, and that the 12-ticket limit applied everywhere else.

   

Welldone will try to persuade Springsteen to throw in a second gig in Helsinki, but this may turn out to be difficult. "The Boss" is a busy man, and when it comes down to it, the scenes in Finland were no different from those witnessed in other parts of the world. Much the same hysteria overtook Sweden, with two stadium-sized concerts sold out yesterday in very short order.