You can rest assured that Bruce Springsteen and Ticketmaster Chairman Barry Diller will not be exchanging Christmas cards this year.
Continuing a verbal battle that dates back to February of this year, Springsteen manager Jon Landau has posted a lengthy letter on the Boss’s website that refutes recent contentions made by the Newark Star Ledger and – although Landau does not specify him by name – by Diller.
As reported by Billboard.com, the Ledger last week reported that approximately 2,300 tickets for a May 21 Springsteen performance at the Izod Center in E. Rutherford were held back for “friends of the band, the record label and the New Jersey Sports and Exhibition Authority, which operates the venue.”
Moreover, the New York Post quoted Diller as saying that 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 battle, 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.”
The implication, according to Landau, is that Springsteen’s ticket holds created the much-publicized “glitch” that occurred in February, when ticket buyers were redirected from the Ticketmaster website to Ticketmaster’s higher-priced resell site, Ticketsnow.com. Landau writes that the holds “had nothing to do at all with the breakdown of Ticketmaster’s system.”
“[The redirection of buyers caused] an undetermined but large amount of money [to flow] into TicketsNow (and eventually Ticketmaster) even though there were still tickets at normal prices yet to be made available on Ticketmaster,” Landau states. “We perceived this to have been a major abuse of our fans, complained about it mightily, and added that because of behavior like this, the pending merger of the number one ticketing company and number one management company (both owned by Ticketmaster) with the number one venue owner and operator (Live Nation) might not be such a hot idea.”
In regards to the Ledger piece, Landau asserts that it’s “the same article that the Star Ledger runs whenever we do a few indoor shows in New Jersey.”
He goes on to say that while significant ticket holds are common when Springsteen plays New Jersey, New York, and Los Angeles, the practice is not done to the detriment of fans.
“The 2,000 to 3,500 tickets closest to the stage are on the floor and more than 95% of them go to the public,” he writes, “making the basic premise of the Star Ledger headline inaccurate. Secondly, with regard to seats held in the best sections on either side, we always blend guest seats with fan seats so that there are never any sections consisting entirely of guest seats.”
Landau goes on to address a number of other ticket issues, writing that Springsteen’s “ticket practices … have evolved over more than 30 years of experience.” In the end, however, he says the Springsteen camp has “no interest in having an ongoing conflict with Ticketmaster/TicketsNow or anyone else.”
“That has not been part of our history,” he writes. “And it is generally not our purpose to spend time on this site on matters of this kind. But we do get upset when we see fans being taken advantage of, as they were on February 2nd. So, when that stuff stops happening (and the Ticketmaster/TicketsNow problems surrounding our recent show in Washington D.C. shows that these issues are far from resolved) we will stop complaining. And when the facts cease to be misrepresented, we will stop explaining.”