New York Times Ben Sisarion kirjoittamassa pitkässä jutussa käsitellään livekeikkojen lippuhintoja. Juttu alkaa ja loppuu Springsteeniin. Tässä suorat lainat muutamista artikkelin kappaleista (siis sieltä täältä), koska juttu on maksumuurin takana.
Omana kommenttina itse keissiin, että enpä olisi ikinä uskonut lukevani laatulehdestä tällaista juttua Springsteenistä. Tämäkin lehtijuttu kertoo tietysti että aikamoinen mainehaittahan tästä nyt on tullut. Syystäkin.
”Live Music Is Roaring Back. But Fans Are Reeling From Sticker Shock.
Buying concert tickets has become a mess of high prices and surcharges, anxiety-inducing registrations and pervasive scalping as some of pop’s biggest acts hit the road again.
Ellen Rothman still speaks with awe about the first time she saw Bruce Springsteen perform, at “a sleazy little blues bar” in Cambridge, Mass., in 1974.
“It was like the roof was going to blow off the venue,” she recalled recently. “I have never experienced anything else like that in my life.”
Now 75, Rothman said she had been to around 180 Springsteen concerts, but was skipping his latest tour. For decades, Springsteen had kept his tickets at bargain rates, buttressing his reputation as a man of the people. But for his current outing with the E Street Band, a chunk of the seats for each venue were sold through “dynamic pricing,” which allows their cost to rise and fall with demand; some went for up to $5,000.
“We feel betrayed on some level,” Rothman said. “I have no problem with an artist making a good living. But at what point do you feel taken advantage of?”
In an interview last year with Rolling Stone, Springsteen endorsed that view. “The ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money,” he said. “I’m going, ‘Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?’”
For the first leg of Springsteen’s tour, which went on sale in July, around 11 percent of seats were designated “Official Platinum,” which are priced dynamically, according to Ticketmaster. The average price for all tickets at that time was $262. Ticketmaster and Springsteen’s camp declined to release any more recent data; representatives for Springsteen also declined to comment for this article.
The cost of tickets for the tour has led to a roiling debate about whether the bond between artist and audience has been broken. Backstreets, the leading Springsteen fan publication since 1980, ran a fiery editorial last year saying that the new pricing “violates an implicit contract between Bruce Springsteen and his fans.” In February, Christopher Phillips, Backstreets’ editor and publisher, said he was shutting down the publication in protest.
Some Springsteen devotees said these price escalations happened en route to checkout. “It’s like going to Walmart and putting a TV in your cart for $399, and you go to the register and they say, ‘Sorry, that’s now $1,000,’” said Roberta Facinelli, a fan in New Orleans.
“Artists want to make money and deliver a great product, and I’m all for that. It’s not 1975 and tickets aren’t $8 anymore.”
That may be cold comfort for fans like Ellen Rothman who built their connection to Springsteen show by show, at prices that for years remained at around $100 but now are often many times higher.
“It’s not worth it,” she said. “Even for Bruce.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/arts ... ticleShare