Last week, Ticketmaster put the upcoming Bruce Springsteen tour on sale to the public. Not surprisingly, there was extremely high demand for the shows. So much so, in fact, that Ticketmaster's servers were overloaded and caused delays for many customers trying to access the Springsteen shows.
This happened a few years ago when Springsteen went on tour, and rather than apologizing and taking blame for their apparent inability to properly manage the load of users for the high-demand shows, they blamed the big, bad ticket broker for all the problems fans encountered. This was both ironic and hypocritical at the time because, what a lot of users found when the dreaded "No Tickets Found" screen popped up was a link to Ticketmaster's resale website, where customers could buy Springsteen tickets for hefty premiums.
Thanks to the massive backlash Ticketmaster experienced as a result of that incident, this time around they are not activating any resale website for Springsteen tickets. However, that didn't stop them from pinning the blame on brokers again, as they issued a statement claiming the website meltdown was due to brokers' use of sophisticated software that would allow them to buy all the tickets and shut the fans out. While that theory is a good and effective way for Ticketmaster to deflect blame for their own incompetence onto their competitors in the secondary market, the facts just do not support their inflammatory claims. While one would not expect objectivity or truth from Ticketmaster on its competitors, you may expect those things from a United States Congressman. Therefore, it was surprising to hear New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell (D) joining in on the broker-bashing. Rep. Pascrell claims that "while many fans were unable to get tickets today, many brokers were able to get their hands on good seats ... and put them up on secondary ticket sellers’ websites." Like Ticketmaster's claims, Pascrell's are fairly ignorant and simply untrue.
As most Springsteen fans know, the hottest shows whenever he tours are around his hometown area - New York (which had two shows at Madison Square Garden), New Jersey (which also had two shows in the Meadowlands), and Philadelphia (two shows at Wells Fargo Center). For most concerts, these arenas can hold about 20,000 fans, which means there were roughly 120,000 seats for all six shows. Taking a look at StubHub today, there was about 7500 tickets total for those six shows. This represents a little more than 6% of all the tickets for the six highest-demand shows of the tour being on the secondary market, hardly an excessive amount that would indicate brokers scooped up a large amount of tickets.
Of course, we can't know how many tickets Ticketmaster actually put onsale to the public because they have so far resisted calls for greater transparency in the way they sell tickets. Specifically, what people - including the fans Ticketmaster claims to care so much about - want to know is how many tickets they put on sale for any show on any given time and how many are held back for VIP's and how many Ticketmaster and the artist hold back to re-sell at a highly inflated profit on the secondary market, like they reportedly did in a recent Van Halen tour.
Ironically, Ticketmaster doesn't seem to have a problem with the secondary market when they are participating in and profiting from it. Perhaps if they invested some of the money they made re-selling tickets on the secondary market they frequently lament or the money they make on their excessive 'convenience fees' into developing a better ticketing website, more fans wouldn't be shut out when hot concerts go on sale. Of course, that would also deny Ticketmaster opportunities to scapegoat their incompetence onto their competitors, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
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