Bruce Springsteen outrages his fans with the “scandalous and exorbitant” prices of his latest tour

Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s manager, attributes this to the desire to combat scalping and the use of a “dynamic pricing” algorithm that is not entirely well calibrated. The fact is that on July 20 tickets for six of the concerts of Springsteen’s 2023 US tour went on sale. Specifically, those in Tampa, Orlando, Hollywood (the coastal city of Florida, not the famous neighborhood of Los Angeles), Tulsa, Denver and Boston. Barely 24 hours later, the community of ever-dedicated fans of the New Jersey artist was seething with outrage: tickets were being sold at “obscene” prices, in some cases exceeding $5,000. And not only that: the cheapest, at a theoretical price of 60 dollars, were conspicuous by their absence.

As Ron Lieber explains in New York Times, “we are not talking about the classic speculative resale, but about scandalous prices, totally exorbitant, in official services such as Ticketmaster”. Even the Twitter account of Backstreet’s Magazinethe oldest and most prestigious of the zines dedicated to Springsteen, echoed the state of collective uneasiness that was being generated: “This time we are suffering a crisis of faith.”

Music journalist Will Werde, former editor-in-chief of the magazine Billboard, also resorted to the networks to air his discontent and astonishment: “Who was going to tell us that Bruce would be the one in charge of making us miss resellers?” In addition, Werde accused the artist of “putting the last nail in the coffin of live music” as it was understood “until just a few years ago” by not intervening to curb a “predatory and abusive” pricing policy.

This is not our Bruce

As Lieber explained, “that music fans protest on networks and public forums for concert prices that they consider abusive is not new, it happens continuously on concert tours. Elton John or of the Rolling Stones”. The pandemic, by imposing an unprecedented drought of live music for more than a year, has contributed to “turning it into a scarce and very precious commodity”, and many promoters intend to “revenge themselves in 2022 and 2023 for the losses they have been accumulating since 2020″.

Bruce Springsteen, during a concert in Barcelona in 2008.EFE

The peculiar thing in this case is that “the person responsible for this show of disregard for his audience is precisely Springsteen, the most populist, the closest, most accessible and authentic of the dinosaurs of rock.” The man who offered his rock with roots and conscience as an antidote to the antisocial outburst that, in his opinion, was the Ronald Reagan’s conservative counterrevolution. When your product is the proletarian ethic, you cannot sell it at the price of Iranian caviar.

Mick Jagger fans, Lieber argues, naturally accept that their idol is “a product and even a luxury that they may not be able to afford.” Those of Bruce, who tend to consider their hero’s live music as “a kind of public service that they neither want nor can deprive themselves of”, are taking those tickets at four-digit prices “as a personal affront, a betrayal of the presumed values ​​of the working class that the singer defends and proclaims for more than five decades”.

Bruce, more than a rock star to use, is the high priest of a contemporary cult with millions of followers. A secular religion whose sacred books are albums like The River, Born to Run either The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shufflebut whose sermons on the mount, the ceremonies that fan the sacred fire, are the concerts.

For his staunchest acolytes, people who invest their savings in following Bruce from Dublin to Rome via Barcelona and Paris, a prohibitively expensive ticket or a “no tickets” sign is equivalent to feeling expelled from the community of believers. The emotional damage caused explains the level of acrimony with which many of them are turning against their idol these days. Just like rock critic Jordi Meya wrote in the magazine Rock Zone“How much is a broken dream worth?”.

The Bruce Springsteen of 50 years ago seemed to be very concerned about the pocketbook of his followers. In December 1972 he performed for the first time in the State of Ohio, at the Hara Arena in the city of Dayton. He did it as the opening act for the band doo wop New York Sha Na Na, in a large venue that that night housed barely a thousand spectators. It was a somewhat soulless concert, before an unreceptive audience and under a poster that, due to the promoters’ clamorous mistake, announced the performance of a certain “Rick Springsteen”. But Bruce’s main complaint, as he explained the next day in a radio interview, was “the armed robbery” suffered by a group of friends from New York who came to see him and had to pay an extra ticket. of 10 dollars (the equivalent of about 70 dollars today).

Bruce Springsteen in a photo from the eighties.
Bruce Springsteen in a photo from the eighties.

The 23-year-old Springsteen considered that five bucks to see a couple of bands was more than enough. If rock renounced its popular roots, it would eventually die, he claimed. Of course, that Bruce was still very much aware of the circuit of bohemian cafes and beach joints in Asbury Park, on the New Jersey shore, the enthusiastic and precarious scene in which he had been performing regularly since 1969 alone or as part of groups like The Castles, Earth or Steel Mill.

A few months later it would go on sale Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, the album with which the Boss would start his inexorable march towards glory. With the leap from obscurity to incipient stardom, $10 would soon become a paltry amount to see rock’s white hope live.

A questionable line of defense

Let’s go back to the present. Bruce and his representatives remained silent while the storm of criticism raged on the networks. Finally, almost a week later, on July 26, Jon Landau, the former music critic who “discovered” Springsteen at a concert in New York in 1974 and who has since served as the rock legend’s manager, spokesman and squire , wanted to come out with a series of technical explanations that have only fueled the fire.

Landau acknowledges that “a tiny percentage” of tickets are being sold at prices over a thousand dollars, but ensures that the average cost per ticket “is in the range of 200, a perfectly normal amount when compared to what it is charging the competition”. The higher amounts are due exclusively, according to Landau’s explanation, to the use of a dynamic price algorithm whose function would be to make intelligent use of the law of supply and demand so that “fans who have more resources acquire preferential seats near of the stage and thus contribute to pay for the much lower price of the rest of the tickets”.

By “dynamic pricing” we mean a flexible sales strategy that is updated in real time and adapts the rates to the evolution of demand. It has been used systematically by airlines and hotel chains for more than a decade and its use has been exported to fields such as mass events due to the rise of electronic commerce and advances in artificial intelligence. The principle is simple: an algorithm analyzes the demand in real time and, if a specific location is in high demand, its price automatically rises, while those less sought after tend to adjust their starting price downwards. In short, it is about “auctioning” each of the available locations to sell them at their ideal price.

The system tends to work optimally and go quite unnoticed in events with a medium or low level of assistance. Less demanded tickets go down in price and can end up being real bargains if they are bought at the last minute, while the most expensive ones remain at acceptable amounts. However, under unusual parameters, in events with the level of expectation and demand that Bruce’s tour has generated, the only way to avoid striking distortions is to establish a maximum limit, in addition to a minimum limit and an average starting price.

Bruce Springsteen signing autographs for some fans.
Bruce Springsteen signing autographs for some fans. MASSIMILIANO MINOCRI

Landau argues that if setting a cap was waived in this particular case, it is because doing so favors resellers, who can then buy at a lower price than the algorithm recommends and then resell without limits on their underground market. In short, it would be a matter of expanding the profit margin of artists and promoters while reducing that of pirates. If someone in particular is willing to pay more than $5,000 to see Bruce, why resign ourselves to paying it to a criminal instead of Bruce himself and his business associates? However, as Steve Appleford explains, “the paradoxical effect of this attempt to fight scalping is that the developers themselves have become the scalpers”.

However, beyond disquisitions on mathematical models and on the law of supply and demand, Landau’s main argument is that tickets at abnormal prices represent a “ridiculous” percentage and that it is perfectly possible to obtain “very decent” seats. for “between 60 and 100 dollars”, a price that he considers “popular”. A large number of fans responded to these statements on social networks showing screenshots as proof of how difficult it was, especially in the case of the Tampa concert, to obtain tickets for less than $ 500 in most areas of the venue very a few hours after they went on sale, when a high percentage of the capacity was still available.

Landau still has one less than irrefutable argument: Bruce hasn’t done anything that other popular music stars like Drake either Taylor Swift, whose concerts pioneered the use of dynamic pricing systems with no upper limit of any kind. The problem, perhaps, is that the Bruce Springsteen of a few years ago, the pride of America’s working class, would never have appeared in the same sentence as Drake or Taylor Swift.

In the midst of controversy, the occasional disenchanted fan brought up data such as that Bruce Springsteen currently has a personal wealth of more than 650 million dollars and that, as an administrator of his own company, he has assigned himself a salary of 80 million annually. What’s more, in December 2021 he sold his music catalog and the publishing rights of this to Sony for an amount greater than 500 million dollars, thus exceeding the 400 million that Bob Dylan obtained in his day.

Bruce, as the journalist from Variety Chris Willman is now an immensely rich man who, moreover, owes much of his wealth to the enormous (and well-deserved) reputation of his live shows. Pretending, at this point, that he intercede so that his fans can see him play for the equivalent of a couple of beers is “supremely naive”. Algorithm or no algorithm, Bruce’s concerts are going to continue to become more and more of a luxury that his die-hard fans won’t always be able to afford. Like the Rolling Stones.

You can follow ICON at Facebook, Twitter, Instagramor subscribe here to the newsletter.

We would like to thank the author of this post for this amazing content

Bruce Springsteen outrages his fans with the “scandalous and exorbitant” prices of his latest tour