Back when Britney was the reigning teen queen, fans could buy tickets to her concerts with some saved-up allowance money. Not so for the groupies of the current pop princess, Hannah Montana (a.k.a. Miley Cyrus): With tickets being scalped for as much as $4,000 a pop, the average tween would have to tap into her college fund to finance the experience. But even carrying this huge price tag—higher than those for recent Police or Bruce Springsteen tours—seats are selling out in a flash.

“I have no idea what drove this Hannah Montana thing; it’s gone completely out of control,” says a ticket seller from a top NYC concierge service who prefers to remain anonymous. “Big icons like Springsteen, you see this. But this is a kids’ show.” There are those (namely, Ticketmaster) who blame recent advances in computer software that allow scalpers to flood the seller’s website with thousands of ticket requests at a time, leaving lay consumers in the lurch. But while sites like Stubhub.com are certainly making a tidy profit, reselling tix for anywhere from $128 to $3,400, some, like our source, think the worst offender is “John Q. Public—somebody who snapped up tickets for $200 and then, realizing how much they could get for them, figured, ‘Why waste these on my six-year-old?’ ”

So, desperate parents are shelling out. “My daughter is seven, and she’s just obsessed,” says one area father who paid a whopping $5,000 for four tickets to one of the Long Island shows. “She’s going to go crazy,” he predicts. “I can’t imagine spending that kind of money on myself—maybe for the Beatles. But that’s what kids do to you.”