When it was announced that Bruce Springsteen would be heading to the Great White Way for a limited-run series of performances on Broadway, fans were overjoyed.
While some fans were able to obtain tickets via Ticketmaster, many more found themselves shut out when tickets went on sale Wednesday. Those who couldn’t were dismayed to see numerous tickets for the in-demand shows showing up almost immediately on ticket-reselling site StubHub at wildly inflated prices — despite Ticketmaster instituting its Verified Fan program intended to shut down speculators.
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“Our best measure of success is the number of Verified Fan tickets that we’ve seen get resold,” David Marcus, EVP, head of music for Ticketmaster North America, told Variety. “Across more than 50 tours so far, we’ve seen less than five per cent of the tickets sold distributed over the secondary market.”
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Almost immediately after tickets went on sale, speculators began offering tickets for as high as $6,000 apiece, “with the cheap seats in the mezzanine listed at $2,000,” Variety reported.
However, Ticketmaster cautions desperate fans not to cave in and fork over big bucks to scalpers, as they may not even have the tickets they claim to be selling.
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“A growing problem that we fight against daily is a practice called ‘Speculative Listing’ (Spec Listing) or ‘Speculative Tickets,” reads a statement from Ticketmaster. “Spec Listing is when unofficial sellers list tickets for sale even though they do not actually have those tickets. They are betting (or speculating) that they will be able to get tickets and then resell them to fans. This is not only wrong, it’s unfair. It forces real fans to compete against resellers who are scrambling to find tickets to fulfill the speculations they made.”
Meanwhile, the Twitterverse was full of Springsteen fans celebrating that they’d managed to grab tickets — and those who were saddened to be shut out.
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