Bobby Olivier in NJ.com Here
Copied and pasted for those who might have trouble: Bruce Springsteen does not care about you | Opinion
Published: Jul. 21, 2022
By Bobby Olivier | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Many jilted Bruce Springsteen fans were still fuming Thursday morning, and for good cause. As some of The Boss’s 2023 U.S. concert dates went on sale Wednesday, prospective buyers were met with massive sticker shock — floor seats skyrocketing to more than $4,000 each retail, due to Ticketmaster’s “Official Platinum” dynamic pricing model, which allows costs to fluctuate based on supply and demand.
After my story reporting the unruly price hikes published Wednesday, I received dozens of emails from irate fans, most of whom repeated the same sentiment: Springsteen, the artist who has defined his career by singing about working-class and disenfranchised Americans, has forgotten his fans. They mirrored the notes I was sent in 2017, when “Springsteen on Broadway” tickets climbed to $850 each for orchestra seats.
And in both cases, who could blame such resentment? It is exceedingly clear that Bruce Springsteen does not care how much a given fan spends to see him play. If he did care, the rock icon who recently sold the rights to his publishing catalog for a cool $500 million — and whose concert tours typically rake in around $200 million at the box office — would refuse to work with Ticketmaster, finance the shows himself, buy permits to use unoccupied fields across America and set a ticket price he alone could control. He’d call it Brucestock or something and pocket considerably less from the fans who’ve supported him for half a century.
But, of course, he won’t do this, because no one does. As with all A-list acts, fans expect Springsteen to play their local arena or stadium, those venues usually have binding contracts with promotional juggernaut Live Nation to operate the performances, and Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster in 2009, creating a smothering entertainment conglomerate that essentially forces artists — who in many cases must also adhere to the desires of their record labels, which in turn have deep-seated relationships with Live Nation and Ticketmaster — to use Ticketmaster to fill their shows, turning a blind eye as fans are price-gouged over and over.
The great irony is that just before the ‘09 merger, Springsteen and his longtime manager Jon Landau condemned the move in an open letter, saying it would be “returning us to a near monopoly situation in music ticketing” as they also railed against Ticketmaster directing their fans to a secondary site to purchase seats for inflated prices.
Yet 13 years later, here we are again.
So perhaps it’s not that Springsteen doesn’t care about his fans, but if he did care, what would it matter? There are too many variables, too many hands in the cookie jar. Repeated requests sent to spokespeople for Springsteen, Live Nation and Ticketmaster for comment were not answered Wednesday or Thursday, but as someone who has covered the live music industry for a decade, this is my educated guess as to what happened Wednesday: Springsteen was surely aware that demand to see his first concert tour in seven years would be exceedingly high. It was also likely he knew his ticket prices on Ticketmaster could fluctuate based on demand — an increasing trend over the last few years, especially since shows returned after the pandemic shutdown (and the industry lost $9.7 billion in ticket sales in 2020 alone).
But I’m not so sure he fully understood retail prices for floor seats — which were only $164 after fees on his last tour in 2016 (using MetLife Stadium prices) — could balloon to more than $4,300 each at face value. Typically, those outlandish prices are saved for “ticket brokers” (see: scalpers) reselling tickets on secondary market sites like Stubhub and SeatGeek at unholy markups.
By no means should Springsteen be let off the hook, however. You’d be a fool to assume Landau and Bruce’s agent didn’t understand what could and would happen. At the very least, he should release a statement explaining his involvement and apologize to his droves of lifelong fans who feel as though they’ve been priced out for good and will never be able to see him perform again. Any and all backlash is deserved; it’s his name on the stub.
Springsteen’s upcoming area shows, in Newark (April 14), New York (April 1), Brooklyn (April 3) and Philadelphia (March 16) don’t go on sale until next Friday, July 29 (Philly goes on sale July 26), and another wave of price hikes and subsequent frustration should be expected. Can anything actually be done before then to rectify this problem, where tippy-top arena nosebleeds jump to more than $200 a pop, as they already have in other Tampa, Tulsa and Denver?
The short answer is no. The fact is, no matter what the price is, someone will eventually pay it. Perhaps not $4,300, but as Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing presumably would allow that price to slowly fall, someone will grab it around, say, $1,000. Other ravenous fans will cave at the last moment and reason that if they don’t go now, Springsteen — 73 years old by the time this tour happens — may never stop by again.
From an economist’s standpoint, one could argue that due to the scarcity of a live concert experience and its finite amount of tickets, allowing for dynamic pricing actually values those seats at what they’re really worth. Free market, capitalism, blah, blah — it’s all cold comfort for any middle-class fan who’s listened to Springsteen for 50 years, supported his early tours and now feels left behind. The only true solution would be a federal mandate to create regulations to cap dynamic ticket pricing and give a grain of power back to the buyers. Or artists could band together and refuse to work with Ticketmaster unless these practices were better moderated or eliminated altogether. Yet the odds of either of these doesn’t seem very high. Pearl Jam tried to pull off the latter in the ‘90s. Jump to now and tickets to their upcoming concert in Camden can be purchased on Ticketmaster today. The cheapest available ticket, at “face value”? It’s over $1,000.
And so the grumbling will rightly continue as Springsteen concerts become elitist events — further exemplars of income inequality only affordable to affluent fans or those prepared to skip a few car payments. The haves and the have-nots become “people who go to Springsteen concerts” and “people who watch Springsteen concerts on YouTube.” And the divide between supporters will continue to grow, as some fans will accept that the unparalleled E Street Band live experience is no longer meant for them, while others will continue to act under the delusion that an artist living on his sprawling Colts Neck horse farm somehow remains a populist rocker with their interests at heart — truly his most brilliant disguise.
Bobby Olivier may be reached at bolivier@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyOlivier and Facebook.