Bruce Springsteen's longtime Jon Landau manager defended the rocker's recent ticket onsales via Ticketmaster, which due to the companies pricing structure made some of the events' choice seats completely unafforadable.
Fans were shut out of great seats due to the company's “Dynamic Pricing” — also called “Platinum Seats” — which forced the sales into super-competitive market-based pricing. Due to the surge in supply and demand, the prices of some of the seats easily soared past the $5,000 mark.
Jon Landau issued a statement to The New York Times finally shedding light on how Springsteen and his organization feel about the ticket situation:
In pricing tickets for this tour, we looked carefully at what our peers have been doing. We chose prices that are lower than some and on par with others.
Regardless of the commentary about a modest number of tickets costing $1,000 or more, our true average ticket price has been in the mid-$200 range. I believe that in today’s environment, that is a fair price to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation.
Ticketmaster has previously stated the choice seats, which admittedly ran into the thousands, represented only 11.2 percent of the overall tickets sold. The company posted the average price of all tickets sold had been only $262, with 56 percent being sold for under $200 face value. The company claimed that only 1.3 percent of total tickets so far have sold for over $1,000.
It's a testament to Bruce Springsteen's life, career, and work that he remains such an important force nearly 50 years after releasing his debut album. Springsteen told us that — even during his earliest days as a musician — he's always taken great efforts to not only entertain – but to inform his audience as well: “I guess you would say that we've devised a language by which we assist ourselves (laughs) and our audience in making sense of the world and their lives, and hopefully in finding both our and their place in the world. That's the job that my favorite movies, my favorite pieces of art, my favorite music always did for me, was that, in some fashion, the artist says, 'OK, take this, and go find your place out there.' It's a passing on of energy and of thought.”
IN OTHER SPRINGSTEEN NEWS
Last night (July 27th) Bruce Springsteen joined Bleachers onstage at New York's Radio City Music Hall.
“The Boss,” playing an acoustic guitar, performed “Chinatown,” as he had on the band's 2021 album, Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night.