Ticketmaster Fires Back At Springsteen

Back in February, Bruce Springsteen and Ticketmaster clashed over an on-sale debacle involving a handful of Springsteen concerts. Fans who tried to buy tickets when they went on sale online were greeted with error messages or redirected to Ticketmaster's secondary resale site, TicketsNow, where they had to pay well above face value for the seats. Springsteen condemned Ticketmaster for the error, saying, "We perceive this as a pure conflict of interest. Ticketmaster is there to ensure that we have a good, fair sale of our tickets at their face value plus normal ticketing charges. TicketsNow is supposed to be a secondary site where people who already have tickets may exchange, trade, and, unfortunately, speculate with them. We have asked this redirection from Ticketmaster to TicketsNow cease and desist immediately and Ticketmaster has agreed to do so in the future and has removed its unwanted material from their and our site."

Now, Ticketmaster head Barry Diller is laying some of the blame on Springsteen himself, after the Newark Star-Ledger broke the news that 1,126 of the best seats available for Springsteen's May 21 performance in East Rutherford, NJ were held back by the band, with most going to friends and family, his record label and the New Jersey Sports and Exhibition Authority, which operates the arena. Only 108 of the good seats were available for sale to the public, raising questions about whether Springsteen contributed to the problem by cutting into the supply of available tickets.
"Bruce Springsteen has been one of our most vocal critics on our ticketing policies and while he's more than entitled to his opinion, it seems minimally fair-minded to point out that in the concert that created the fracas, where Ticketmaster apologized for making a technical mistake, it seems that Mr. Springsteen held back from his fans all but 108 of the 1,126 tickets closest to the stage," Diller said, according to the New York Post.

However, Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau, posted a message on BruceSpringsteen.net to refute the claims. "Somehow, a new flurry of interest has been created around Thrill Hill's ticket holds for the recent Izod Center shows. These are the same shows that became such a subject of controversy when they went on sale on February 6," Landau wrote. "The new theory is that Bruce's holds were the problem on February 6, and not Ticketmaster's already acknowledged failures on that day. But the truth is that Bruce's holds had nothing to do at all with the breakdown of Ticketmaster's system."

Landau then outlined the fact that when the ticket fiasco occurred, "Ticketmaster's CEO wrote to Bruce, myself, and our fans to generously apologize. The letter stated that the problem was the product of an inexplicable glitch." Furthermore, due to complaints from consumers, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram secured a consent degree from Ticketmaster, in which they promised that some of their practices with regard to TicketsNow will never be repeated. Plus, the CEO of Ticketmaster openly testified as to their responsibility for these "glitches" in front of Committees of Congress.

Landau's posting goes on to explain that the band does hold significant numbers of tickets for family; record label staffers, reviewers, radio stations, charities who are provided with tickets for fund raising, and other similar purposes. However, "The 2,000 to 3,500 tickets closest to the stage are on the floor and more than 95 percent of them go to the public, making the basic premise of the Star Ledger headline inaccurate," he maintained. "Those are our ticket practices, as they have evolved over more than 30 years of experience. Does anyone seriously imagine that any element of these practices caused Ticketmaster to redirect ticket requests to TicketsNow for the Izod Center shows? What would our incentive have been? It's not we who earned vastly larger sums when fans paid way over the face value of the tickets. It was Ticketmaster/TicketsNow."