Blinded by the price: High Springsteen ticket costs are ‘fair,’ Boss’ manager says

Suck it up, Springsteen fans — you’re paying “a fair price to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation.”

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band bring ‘The River Tour’ to Philadelphia at the Wells Fargo Center on Feb. 12, 2016.Read moreCHARLES FOX / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

by Nick Vadala

Published July 27, 2022, 12:28 p.m. ET

Suck it up, Bruce Springsteen fans — you’re paying “a fair price to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation.”

At least according to Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, who released a statement to the New York Times on Tuesday after days of fan outrage in the face of Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” system debacle.

Ticketmaster instituted a sliding price scale for platinum seats for some stops on Springsteen’s 2023 U.S. arena tour, which caused some seats to increase in price to $5,000 or more, confusing and enraging fans, who expressed their frustration en masse on social media. The system, Ticketmaster notes online, ”enables market-based pricing (adjusting prices according to supply and demand) for live ticket events, similar to how airline tickets and hotel rooms are sold.”

After days of fans calling for Springsteen, or at least someone Springsteen-adjacent, to address the situation, Landau finally has. Basically, the message is: Chill out.

“In pricing tickets for this tour, we looked carefully at what our peers have been doing,” Landau said in a statement to the Times. “We chose prices that are lower than some and on par with others.”

Landau said that “a modest number of tickets” sold for $1,000 or more, and that the “true average ticket price” for seats that went on sale last week was 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,” Landau said.

The rationale from Springsteen’s camp came a few days after Ticketmaster itself released a set of stats on prices for the Boss’ tickets. Initially, the tickets were priced at $60 to $400 before fees — a price range in which about 88.8% of tickets sold. The remaining 11.2%, Ticketmaster said, were platinum tickets, and fluctuated — sometimes significantly — in price.

But, overall, the ticketing platform said, about 56% of tickets were priced under $200, and the average price of tickets sold in the first three days of the on-sale period was $262. About 1.3% of tickets reportedly sold for more than $1,000.

In Philadelphia, though, the problem fans had wasn’t so much pricing as it was timing. Tickets for Springsteen’s March 16 show at the Wells Fargo Center went on sale via the venue’s website — not Ticketmaster — on Tuesday, and many fans online complained of long wait times in a digital queue. And, in some cases, fans who waited for hours in line ultimately still weren’t able to purchase tickets, regardless of their price.

The demand was intense, and some fans were met with a status message on the Wells Fargo Center website that called the on-sale “the largest demand for tickets in Philadelphia music history.” A source told The Inquirer that that statement came from the band’s promoter, not the arena.

“After 18,000 shows over 54 years, I’ve never seen ticket demand like this before,” said veteran Philadelphia concert promoter Larry Magid. “At one point, we had over 90,000 in queue trying to purchase tickets. There is only one artist that can create this kind of excitement and that’s Bruce Springsteen.”