I'm not sure what Ticketmaster regret more, buying secondary ticketing website Tickets Now or bidding to be Bruce Springsteen's primacy ticketing agent. As much previously reported, the two things together have brought the ticketing giant a lot of bad press, just at a time when they could do without being portrayed as anti-competitive, or anti-consumer, what with regulators reviewing their proposals to merge with major league tour promoter and venue owner Live Nation.
As previously reported, Bruce Springsteen hit out after he learned that Ticketmaster were promoting sale of his tickets on their ticket touting website Tickets Now, where tickets are, of course, sold at a considerable mark up.
He was particularly angry because consumers were accidentally sent to Tickets Now to buy touted Spingsteen tickets whenever the main Ticketmaster server was too busy to sell fans official face value tickets - ie fans were being encouraged to buy touted tickets even though official tickets were still available. Some claimed it was in Ticketmaster's interest for touted tickets to be sold, because they earn money twice - one commission on the sale of the primary ticket, and another on the resale of that ticket via Tickets Now.
Ticketmaster apologised for the cock up that sent Springsteen fans to the touting website when the primary site server was busy, offered various refunds to those who'd bought marked up tickets as a result, and pledged to be much more responsible with its promotion of Tickets Now via its main Ticketmaster website in the future, even when all primary tickets had sold out. As consumer groups had been expressing concern about Ticketmaster's ownership and promotion of Tickets Now for a while, Springsteen was seen by many as the champion of the consumer and the normal music fan over a major corporation out of control.
But last week an American newspaper reported that, at the concert around which most of the ticketing cock ups occurred, the normal music fan was at a disadvantage not only because of Ticketmaster's interests in the secondary ticketing market, but also because Spingsteen and his management had kept back 2300 tickets for themselves, including over a thousand of the best seats in the house. While artists, managers and venues often keep tickets aside for friends and associates, the Newark Star Ledger claimed that the high number of tickets kept aside by Springsteen's people made it hard for fans to get good seats at the concert, and fuelled the touting market by reducing the number of tickets available to the public. The paper also claimed Springsteen and his people had broken a New Jersey state rule about the maximum number of tickets for a public event that management are allowed to hold back.
After that story broke, Ticketmaster overlord Barry Diller told the New York Post " 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 apologised for making a technical mistake, it seems that Mr. Springsteen held back from his fans all but 108 of the 1126 tickets closest to the stage".
Diller probably should have let the matter lie. His comments have led to another attack from the Springsteen camp. His manager, Jon Landau, has posted a long message on the singer's website. He says that he and Springsteen were right to complain about the misdirection of the singer's fans to the Tickets Now service, and that the almost immediate response of Diller's colleague, Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff, who explained about the technical cock up and apologised, was proof of that. The fact the New Jersey District Attorney subsequently got involved and secured commitments from the ticketing firm about its promotion of Tickets Now, and that discussions about the affair took place in US Congress, was, he said, even further proof they were in the right.
On more recent developments, Landau continues: "Last Sunday the Newark Star Ledger ran an article entitled 'Springsteen withheld best tickets from the public at NJ concert, records show'. This is the same article that the Star Ledger runs whenever we do a few indoor shows in New Jersey. It suggested that we were in some way responsible for the Ticketmaster/TicketsNow problem. On Friday Ticketmaster's Chairman attacked Bruce personally in the New York Post. In this article, Ticketmaster's Chairman deploys by implication Ticketmaster's new line: despite their apology, despite the consent decree with Attorney General Milgram, and despite their testimony in Congress, the ticket catastrophe was actually Bruce's fault".
He responds: "The Chairman's spin is that it's flatly untrue. He is merely using the time honored tradition of blowing smoke to distract attention away from Ticketmaster's already acknowledged responsibility for their 'glitches'".
Responding more specifically to the Ledger's story, though sneaking in another attack on Ticketmaster in the process, he continued: "Yes, we do hold significant numbers of tickets when we play New Jersey, New York and Los Angeles, as does every arena headliner. These holds are used by Bruce, his band members, and longtime members of his extended organisation, their families and close relations; by the record label for their staff, for reviewers, and for radio stations; by charities who are provided with tickets for fund raising purposes, such as special auctions; for service people who help us on a year-round basis; and for other similar purposes. Unlike some Ticketmaster managed artists , no tickets are held for high dollar resale on TicketsNow, or through any other means".
He adds that the Ledger's article is inaccurate in saying that most of the 'best seats in the house' were held back. He explains: "The 2000 to 3500 tickets closest to the stage are on the floor and more than 95% of them go to the public, 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".
Concluding, Landau says: "These are our ticket practices, as they have evolved over more than 30 years of experience. Does anyone seriously imagine that any element of these practices caused Ticketmaster to redirect ticket requests to TicketsNow for the Izod Center shows? What would our incentive have been? It's not we who earned vastly larger sums when fans paid way over the face value of the tickets. It was Ticketmaster/TicketsNow. We have no interest in having an ongoing conflict with Ticketmaster/TicketsNow or anyone else. But we do get upset when we see fans being taken advantage of. 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".