Regarding the Hyde Park show, guess what they did? (After stating that both shows are sellouts)


They now changed the BST Hyde Park layout so only "Diamond" is the front of stage area. Golden Circle is behind it.

Check the updated BST website here and scroll all the way down.

When the tickets first went on sale, this was not the map at all! In fact, Golden Circle had a bigger portion of the front of stage area than Diamond did!

This is the new map:



This was the old map, in place when the tickets were on sale:




Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2022-07-27 20:44 by Topi.

My friends were able to get the face value GA Pits for Seattle. 400 each plus fees.

I think that level of pricing is disgusting. I know the world has changed since i bought Springsteen seats in Sheffield for £17.50 in back in '88..... but it hasn't changed THAT much!

The worst part is that with the dynamic/Plat pricing going on, getting a ticket for 400 seems like a good deal.

Quote
bakersfield
I think that level of pricing is disgusting. I know the world has changed since i bought Springsteen seats in Sheffield for £17.50 in back in '88..... but it hasn't changed THAT much!

Maybe it has. I paid $15 to see the Stones with Van Halen in 1981.

How ironic. Now that the rock and roll dinosaurs are playing at a level far below their peak, you have to pay much, much more to see them. I saw Springsteen, 14th row, for $7.50 in 1978. That same year I saw the Stones in Cleveland for $13.00, and that seemed high. Hell, I saw a triple bill of Dylan/Joni Mitchell & Van Morrison for $50 in 1998.

It is disgusting what the ticket prices have bloated into. Two hundred dollars to sit at the very top of a football stadium, as far from the band as you can get. The highest I ever paid for $225, Mezzanine, First Row, Anaheim, 1999. I got a Mick smile and we pointed fingers at each other.

Now you get less, much less, for much, much more.

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crholmstrom

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Angus MacBagpipe
Bruce’s complete silence on this sh*t-show and the upset it has caused his long-time fans is probably the most disturbing aspect. $800 broadway tickets, Jeep ads, hanging out with politicians, $500 million catalog sale, and now this. What a sad way to end a career.

It's not he has an elaborate stage/light show. It's been close to the same since the late 70s basically. With Roger Waters for instance you can see where the money goes in the production. I still would like to go but not at any cost.

My thoughts exactly. And you knew what you were paying for at the Steel Wheels and Bridges tours. Bruce has had the same basic stage for over 30 years.

I did luck out this morning however and got two decent seats for Seattle at the normal price in under 8 minutes. No way I was buying any ridiculous resales or “premium” seats.

Springsteen bellowing for two or three hours...mercifully he doesn't do four hour shows anymore...

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

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Topi

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TheGreek
Not a fan of Ticketmaster at all , but they are the scape goat in this as this was all designed and signed off by Bruce . Proof is in the silence from Bruce . Why not set the record straight and own up to it . Bruce could have a top 10 list of reasons why he is doing this . Or is he staying silent in anticipation of the tour start that due to lacking demand that the tickets prices come back down to earth . Or else he will be seeing empty seats which is hard to imagine . Same as on Stones tours as tickets and prices drop closer to show time . Putting the squeeze on the scalper . I would say is pretty ingenious and Bruce figures why should the scalper get the money from my labor ?

The seats won't be empty in the end - the question is just how much can Ticketmaster gouge for them. It's about the average ticket price. They don't realistically expect to sell a seat for 5000 dollars, but if they flex it down to, say, 800-900 dollars, some fool might bite. "Hey, look, that $5000 seat is down to $900 now, I better act on it!"

That's what they're after, squeezing as much as possible out of the buyers.

If the Platinum prices don't sell, they'll just flex them back down to face value/Standard Admission price and the people will come running as it looks like they're getting a good deal.

As you said, it's very much like what happened with Stones tickets.

The prices will drop closer to show time in most markets. Maybe not so much in a place like MSG.

As a long time Bruce fan myself, I am not too happy with this situation. Whatever the reason for this ticket debacle, it certainly doesn't make "the man of the people" look too good, does it?

Anyway, for many, many years now (with the exception of concerts that are far away from me that I don't want to travel for and take the risk), I've learned to wait day of the show or close to it to get decent seats (even for shows that are supposedly sold out) at affordable/reasonable prices. It's a gamble, but for the most part, it has worked for me. If I choose to see Bruce who is slated to play Buffalo, I may do the same thing.

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Angus MacBagpipe

Quote
crholmstrom

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Angus MacBagpipe
Bruce’s complete silence on this sh*t-show and the upset it has caused his long-time fans is probably the most disturbing aspect. $800 broadway tickets, Jeep ads, hanging out with politicians, $500 million catalog sale, and now this. What a sad way to end a career.

It's not he has an elaborate stage/light show. It's been close to the same since the late 70s basically. With Roger Waters for instance you can see where the money goes in the production. I still would like to go but not at any cost.

My thoughts exactly. And you knew what you were paying for at the Steel Wheels and Bridges tours. Bruce has had the same basic stage for over 30 years.

I did luck out this morning however and got two decent seats for Seattle at the normal price in under 8 minutes. No way I was buying any ridiculous resales or “premium” seats.

It took me a few minutes longer but I did well for Seattle. I got ADA seats 4 rows back behind the stage which are actually pretty good for Bruce. He usually spends a healthy amount of time playing to the people behind him. Spent about $260 for the pair service charges included. It was within the budget I set about what I was able to spend. Unless something else comes up it will be my first visit to Climate Pledge Arena. I might go to a Kraken game before then, depends how tight those tickets are. Right now, I'm all about going to Mariners games. Went yesterday, fantastic game. Julio Rodriguez is the real deal!

Quote
Topi
Regarding the Hyde Park show, guess what they did? (After stating that both shows are sellouts)


They now changed the BST Hyde Park layout so only "Diamond" is the front of stage area. Golden Circle is behind it.

Check the updated BST website here and scroll all the way down.

When the tickets first went on sale, this was not the map at all! In fact, Golden Circle had a bigger portion of the front of stage area than Diamond did!

This is the new map:



This was the old map, in place when the tickets were on sale:

Wow that's cruel. People buying the gold category to be in front of the stage and then they just change it so that gold is behind diamond. It that even legal? Normally I don't think so but damn sure they had some disclaimer in the fine print ("Layout subject to change at any time" or some stuff like that)

Edit: Already found it. At the very bottom of your picture)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-07-28 13:18 by StonedRambler.

They now changed the map back, so it was probably just a mistake with the new website.

[www.bst-hydepark.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2022-07-28 14:06 by Topi.

Bruce guesting with Bleachers - Radio City Music Hall, July 26:

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bye bye johnny
Bruce guesting with Bleachers - Radio City Music Hall, July 26:

must be an old guy lapse in taste thing like Mick praising Machine Gun Kelly. I don't know enough about Yungblud (other than he flunked spelling) to criticize

He's on the original recording of "Chinatown" and also appears in the video:

Bruce Springsteen and how not to do public relations

By Dan Tapper
Jul 29, 2022

[www.courant.com]

Springsteen Fans Raged Over Ticket Prices. Experts Say There’s No Easy Fix

Eye-popping ticket prices have generated furious op-eds and social media posts in recent weeks. A group of experts weigh in on what’s wrong with the system alongside various solutions

By Andy Greene & Ethan Millman
August 2, 2022

[www.rollingstone.com]

Over on BTX there's "How Did You Do?" survey thread.

What I posted:

__________
Wasn't let in for Greensboro til 10:30, which was too late. They'd given their "We've Unleashed The Price-Jacking Kraken" warning at 10:20. At 10:30 I didn't find any good standard price tix left, and bought nothing.

For DC's Capital One Arena I got through the queue at 10:15, so I still had a chance.

Grabbed and went to checkout with a standard price GA Pit three times, and all three times got the "somebody else beat you" result.

That was wasting precious minutes during which prices were changing all over. I gave up the GA Pit pursuit and searched the three floor sections just beyond GA, Sections 1,.2, and 3.

Found one standard price ($399.50) tic left, Section 1, albeit in Sec. 1's 16th and last row. Ran with it anyway... I found nothing else left at that price.

Had no idea what the fees would be because every time I'd turned on the "show price with fees" filter and tried to check out with a GA Pit tic, when I lost those tix, somehow (TM) my "show price with fees" filter was flipped back off again. So when I saw the fees boosted my $400 Section 1 tic to an unconscionable $524, I hesitated a moment.

I've seen Bruce five times. 1978. Twice in 1981. 1985. And 2016. But I'd never been down on the floor in any of those five shows.

So I paid it. $524 for Captal One Arena floor Section 1 Row P I do not consider to be a great deal.  But I realize many have not gotten standard price seats at all. And, the way all this is going, this will likely be my last Springsteen show. So, okay.. I'll pay this much one time, to finally be on the floor.

_________

****
I'm down in Virginia
with your Cousin Lou

Bruce should've scheduled another show in the South. Atlanta sold out quickly. I checked a week later, and TM released more tickets (lowest was $675), essentially scalping their own tickets. Let the show "sell out," then a week later, release more tickets, not at regular price, but VIP prices. Not new, but sleazy, nevertheless.

Man, would living back in Oklahoma help in instances like these. I think they still have face value Pearl Jam and Bruce tickets. Both sold out almost immediately in the south (PJ-Nashville and Bruce-Atlanta).

The TM/LiveNation monopoly is gross. Why hasn't another group started up to combat TM/LN and start a competition?

On BTX's "Who Bought All The Tickets?" thread, after several days of puzzling myself, and reading, posted (in my usual, internet-unfriendly long-form writing style) the following;

____________

Trying to sort out a broad picture here, this is my impression at this stage, tho with more shoes yet to drop, I'm sure.

* Verified Fans did get many, many tickets at the now-higher "standard prices," at every show. Mostly only during the very first minutes of those 4-hour sales, though. If you weren't let out of the queue in the first 15 or 20 min., though, your chances were not good unless you were after the cheaper seats. And those, too, for most shows, would also disappear soon.

* We have no way to know for sure, because TM is a very opaque corporation, but it's possible the great majority of tix did get sold at standard price. But TM is such a black box, intentionally, that there's so much that we don't know and will never be allowed to know. No outside authority requires TM to give a full accounting of what it sells, at what price, and when. So they largely do what they want. What they want is to maximize revenue. And igniting a feeding frenzy and panic buying on initial release of tix is their most useful single tactic for maximizing revenue.

* Among the many things we don't, and will not know, are: How many tix get released immediately, and how many are they holding back to work with and manipulate later? How many are already Platinum at the start? And how many get bumped from standard price to Platinum later? What are the thresholds of sales, time, and people still queued up, at which they decide enough with the standard price sales, and start jacking the remaining standards up to platinums? Because much of this of course is theater, a drama to convince people, uh-oh, I better buy that overpriced tic now, because everything's "gone" except Platinums and the Platinums keep moving higher.

* The manipulation is extreme. Those standard price tix, as they blip out in front of our eyes... those, yes, are almost surely being bought. But we witness Platinums blip out off the screen, too, as we watch. Almost all of those, I believe, are merely deception by TM, seeking to stoke the fires of panic buying. Setting at least a few people up to be more likely to actually buy another Platinum... especially a slightly lower Platinum than the one that just (somehow) disappeared.

None of this is new to TM. I was aware of it all before. This tour's sales were just an unprecedentedly brutal execution of it... at least in the two sales (Greensboro and DC) I was in. Seems like the frustration was lower in some other venues, and TM may have backed off the pedal by the NYC sales.

* What WAS new information for me was the (frankly astonishing) assessment by a few people that the Platinums present when Verified Fan sales closed at 2pm, at 3pm when the general sale opened... had magically become no longer TM's property anymore, but now were owned by (supposed) THIRD PARTIES! They'd "been sold" and instantly posted for "Verified Resale"... during the hour of shut-down when sales weren't even occurring.

What the hell?

Then I read on a BTX thread that, yeah, that happens. TM transfers ownership of a lot of Platinums, en masse, to its own wholly owned subsidiary, TicketsNow. It's easy for TM to do in an instant. And, presto, now we are being led to believe an army of bad-guy scalpers are on their site as Verified Resellers.

While this does seem to be almost the only logical way this could occur in that kind of timeframe, if the great majority of those "re-sales" we see offerred the first day as the general sale opens truly are still TM's, merely held by its subsidiary TicketsNow, that is a very gross form and level of deception and manipulation.

Is that truly what happened? I'm very curious about that now.

Among other things, just flipping a lot of Platinums over to TicketsNow to relist as re-sales, TM could in an instant have repriced them first, back down to standard, and thus count all of those tix as having been sold, by them, TM, AT standard price. Even while never having offerred them to real people as such. Just fancy accounting footwork to enable some of their carefully crafted and very misleading press releases.

_________

****
I'm down in Virginia
with your Cousin Lou

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NashvilleBlues
Bruce should've scheduled another show in the South. Atlanta sold out quickly. I checked a week later, and TM released more tickets (lowest was $675), essentially scalping their own tickets. Let the show "sell out," then a week later, release more tickets, not at regular price, but VIP prices. Not new, but sleazy, nevertheless.

Man, would living back in Oklahoma help in instances like these. I think they still have face value Pearl Jam and Bruce tickets. Both sold out almost immediately in the south (PJ-Nashville and Bruce-Atlanta).

The TM/LiveNation monopoly is gross. Why hasn't another group started up to combat TM/LN and start a competition?

Still plenty of small indie promoters and ticketing companies.

AEG/Goldenvoice and AXS tickets is the main competitor. They have their own venues and ticketing and often produce entire tours (Roger Waters is an example). But when you realize their real customers are the acts and venues you know it's not going to be any better.

Quote
Dan

Quote
NashvilleBlues
Bruce should've scheduled another show in the South. Atlanta sold out quickly. I checked a week later, and TM released more tickets (lowest was $675), essentially scalping their own tickets. Let the show "sell out," then a week later, release more tickets, not at regular price, but VIP prices. Not new, but sleazy, nevertheless.

Man, would living back in Oklahoma help in instances like these. I think they still have face value Pearl Jam and Bruce tickets. Both sold out almost immediately in the south (PJ-Nashville and Bruce-Atlanta).

The TM/LiveNation monopoly is gross. Why hasn't another group started up to combat TM/LN and start a competition?

Still plenty of small indie promoters and ticketing companies.

AEG/Goldenvoice and AXS tickets is the main competitor. They have their own venues and ticketing and often produce entire tours (Roger Waters is an example). But when you realize their real customers are the acts and venues you know it's not going to be any better.

AXS is no better & a lot of times their tickets come via Ticketmaster. Don't know about AEG.

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StonedRambler
For Bruce Springsteen who always presented himself as the speaker of the working class this whole thing could get quite dangerous for him if he indeed agreed on all that.

As for the Stones, nobody is suprised about them being greedy bastards, they never claimed the opposite, they love making big money with this tours (even if it's always said the promoters make the prices and not the band).

Bruce is as working class as I am rich. His faux working man tales have always been see through.

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crholmstrom

Quote
Dan

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NashvilleBlues
Bruce should've scheduled another show in the South. Atlanta sold out quickly. I checked a week later, and TM released more tickets (lowest was $675), essentially scalping their own tickets. Let the show "sell out," then a week later, release more tickets, not at regular price, but VIP prices. Not new, but sleazy, nevertheless.

Man, would living back in Oklahoma help in instances like these. I think they still have face value Pearl Jam and Bruce tickets. Both sold out almost immediately in the south (PJ-Nashville and Bruce-Atlanta).

The TM/LiveNation monopoly is gross. Why hasn't another group started up to combat TM/LN and start a competition?

Still plenty of small indie promoters and ticketing companies.

AEG/Goldenvoice and AXS tickets is the main competitor. They have their own venues and ticketing and often produce entire tours (Roger Waters is an example). But when you realize their real customers are the acts and venues you know it's not going to be any better.

AXS is no better & a lot of times their tickets come via Ticketmaster. Don't know about AEG.

AEG is a mega promoter and AXS is their proprietary ticketing system, unaffiliated with Ticketmaster.

Quote
Dan

Quote
crholmstrom

Quote
Dan

Quote
NashvilleBlues
Bruce should've scheduled another show in the South. Atlanta sold out quickly. I checked a week later, and TM released more tickets (lowest was $675), essentially scalping their own tickets. Let the show "sell out," then a week later, release more tickets, not at regular price, but VIP prices. Not new, but sleazy, nevertheless.

Man, would living back in Oklahoma help in instances like these. I think they still have face value Pearl Jam and Bruce tickets. Both sold out almost immediately in the south (PJ-Nashville and Bruce-Atlanta).

The TM/LiveNation monopoly is gross. Why hasn't another group started up to combat TM/LN and start a competition?

Still plenty of small indie promoters and ticketing companies.

AEG/Goldenvoice and AXS tickets is the main competitor. They have their own venues and ticketing and often produce entire tours (Roger Waters is an example). But when you realize their real customers are the acts and venues you know it's not going to be any better.

AXS is no better & a lot of times their tickets come via Ticketmaster. Don't know about AEG.

AEG is a mega promoter and AXS is their proprietary ticketing system, unaffiliated with Ticketmaster.

I bought my Roger Waters ticket (face value) through Ticketmaster. However, I bought my Blondie/The Damned ticket entirely through AXS. Odd.

Quote
NashvilleBlues

Quote
Dan

Quote
crholmstrom

Quote
Dan

Quote
NashvilleBlues
Bruce should've scheduled another show in the South. Atlanta sold out quickly. I checked a week later, and TM released more tickets (lowest was $675), essentially scalping their own tickets. Let the show "sell out," then a week later, release more tickets, not at regular price, but VIP prices. Not new, but sleazy, nevertheless.

Man, would living back in Oklahoma help in instances like these. I think they still have face value Pearl Jam and Bruce tickets. Both sold out almost immediately in the south (PJ-Nashville and Bruce-Atlanta).

The TM/LiveNation monopoly is gross. Why hasn't another group started up to combat TM/LN and start a competition?

Still plenty of small indie promoters and ticketing companies.

AEG/Goldenvoice and AXS tickets is the main competitor. They have their own venues and ticketing and often produce entire tours (Roger Waters is an example). But when you realize their real customers are the acts and venues you know it's not going to be any better.

AXS is no better & a lot of times their tickets come via Ticketmaster. Don't know about AEG.

AEG is a mega promoter and AXS is their proprietary ticketing system, unaffiliated with Ticketmaster.

I bought my Roger Waters ticket (face value) through Ticketmaster. However, I bought my Blondie/The Damned ticket entirely through AXS. Odd.

It could have to do with venue contracts. My Waters ticket came via Ticketmaster also.

The Waters tour is AEG promoted only in that they purchase exclusive rights to the tour and book it. Crypto.com Arena, Target Center in Minneapolis and whatever in Las Vegas have exclusive contracts with AXS for the ticketing (though I am starting to see some TM on Crypto.com now) while most of the rest are arenas with exclusive Ticketmaster contracts.

Of course Live Nation and AEG have to use each others venues, because an artist is not going to skip playing a city just because their preferred promoter isn't the dominant force in the region among other reasons.

[www.washingtonpost.com]

This is a pretty well done article.

Paywall. [Edit: But below bye bye johnny posted a link to it free on msn. (Thnx.))

A longtime WaPo subscriber, I chimed in. I doubt anyone will even see it, though, it's in the 1,600s among probably 2k+ comments by now.

Here's the comment. The first 1 1/2 paragraphs are stuff already posted; the rest isn't. I point out the public images the Stones v. Springsteen have pitched.

__________

Just 20 min into the sale for the Capital One Arena show -- I got through their Queue at 15 min -- Ticketmaster announced they'd Released The Price-Gouging Kraken of Dynamic Pricing. Standard price tickets were rapidly becoming very scarce, when you selected one odds were you couldn't get thru checkout with it, and prices were soaring to TM's "Platinums" all over. I finally did manage to check out with a floor seat at its standard price of $400 ( - 50 cents). I did hesitate when I saw TM's unconscionable fees made the full price $524.

But in the 5 Springsteen shows I've seen -- 1978, 1981, 1981, 1985, 2016 -- I'd never been down on the floor, and wanted to enough to pay this, one time. This kind of price got me into R. Stones pits in 2019 and 2021. This isn't a pit ticket, though.

I know, "first world problems."

The difference is, having been a Stones fan since I was 14 (1969) and a Bruce fan since 20 (1975), we've always known the Stones are fast-living, money-grabbing pirates. Springsteen, in contrast, has 100 songs pointing out the common man just doesn't get a fair deal in our country. That is what makes this unsettling. $524, yeah, it is my choice, I'm paying it for an okay seat in a concert. But it does feel like an unjustifiable extravagance, none among the ticket-scalping behemoth, the promoter, the venue, nor Springsteen Inc., remotely needing that kind of money. If instead half of the price had been earmarked as a donation for victims of Putin's barbarism, or domestic abuse women's shelters, or Bruce's favorite charity, food banks, that $524 I would have paid happily.

To be clear, I've never mistaken Bruce for Jesus, or even St. Francis of Assisi. In truth, he has posed a bit as a Woody Guthrie or a Pete Seeger. But it is a significant disappointment to many of us to now be thinking Joel Osteen might be the better analogy.

[end of my WaPo comment]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-08-05 10:31 by TheBluesHadaBaby.

WaPo article via MSN:

Bruce Springsteen fans face $5,000 tickets — and a ‘crisis of faith’

Allison Stewart
August 3, 2022

[www.msn.com]

Just give up. Watch old DVDs. My god that '79 No Nukes concert with Bruce and the E Street band is fabulous. Bruce solo, and with the band, are all over the Amnesty International DVD set filmed during the mid-80s. Get the Born to Run boxset and you'll get a complete DVD concert from 1975 at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. Find them all, used or new, and you still will have paid less than a nosebleed ticket in some cavernous arena. BONUS: You'll get Clarence Clemens and Danny Federici!

What the hell do you need to go to an actual Bruce concert before if you've seen him in much better times? Do you really have to hear Glory Days one more time?