Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s long-time manager, has defended the controversial prices for “platinum” tickets for the Boss’s 2023 US tour – which have gone on sale for as much as $5,000.
Speaking with The New York Times’ Your Money columnist Ron Lieber, Landau said: “In pricing tickets for this tour, we looked carefully at what our peers have been doing. We chose prices that are lower than some and on par with others.”
Landau’s statement came just days after Lieber published a commentary about how fans had been surprised to find out that Springsteen tickets were being sold for multiple thousands of dollars due to Ticketmaster’s demand-driven dynamic pricing system, also called “platinum” seats.
The system adjusts the prices of tickets based on reaction to customer demand; it’s a little like the way airline seats are sold, and has attracted comparisons to Uber’s ‘surge pricing’.
The Springsteen prices have drawn criticism from many fans and even industry experts including Bill Werde, a former Billboard editorial director.
“Hard to believe that Bruce Springsteen turned out to be the one to make music fans miss scalpers,” Werde quipped on Twitter this week.
In response to the criticisms, Landau told the NYT: “Regardless of the commentary about a modest number of tickets costing $1,000 or more, our true average ticket price has been 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.”
“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.”
Jon Landau
The defense from Springsteen’s team came two days after Ticketmaster told Variety that over 88% of the tickets for the tour had already been sold, despite the backlash.
Only 11.2% of the total allocation, said Ticketmaster, has been sold as “platinum tickets”.
“Prices and formats are consistent with industry standards for top performers,” Ticketmaster was quoted by news outlets as saying.
Springsteen is among the world’s best-selling songwriters and live artists in history. The Born to Run singer, whose music career goes as far back as the 1960s, has released 20 studio albums.
The multi-award winning artist sold both his recorded music and music publishing catalogs to Sony Music Group in December 2021. (The publishing side of that deal was co-financed by Eldridge Industries.)
“During the last 50 years, the men and women of Sony Music have treated me with the greatest respect as an artist and as a person. I’m thrilled that my legacy will continue to be cared for by the company and people I know and trust,” Springsteen said of the deal with Sony.
Financial terms of that transaction were not made public, but the entire acquisition is believed to have been valued at about $550 million.Music Business Worldwide