Bruce Springsteen fans irked by 'dynamic ticket pricing'

LOS ANGELES: The fans of heartland rock music icon Bruce Springsteen are furious over the ticket prices for the opening shows on the musician's 2023 arena tour.

Fans, who logged on for the first day of ticket sales found tickets going for as $4,000-5,000 for mid-range floor seats, and into the four-figures for other, less desirable tickets that remained, reports Variety.

If these were being offered on the secondary market, offers that exorbitant might be expected but, what gave fans sticker shock was that these were face value tickets, with no middleman jacking up the price.

According to Variety, it was an introduction for many fans to Ticketmaster's "dynamic pricing" program, in which "platinum tickets" - which may be placed anywhere in the arena, from the front section to the back rows - fluctuate in price, in what is said to be ongoing reaction to demand.

The system lets ticket prices quickly rise to a level it's believed resellers would get for them, keeping that extra money in-house for the artist and promoter. Fan ire was quickly evident in responses to an early tweet from Backstreets, the Springsteen fan magazine, which posted a screenshot of the price for one seat on for the tour's opening night and wondered: "Tampa mid-floor for $4,400, anyone?" (That's an amount that included $3,819 in face value plus $569.50 in fees.)

Other perturbed fans quickly joined in with screenshots of the unusually costly offers they were getting, once they'd gone through Ticketmaster's Verified Fan system and waited in an online queue.

Only the first six cities on the tour went on sale Wednesday (Pacific Standard Time) - Tampa, Orlando and Hollywood, all in Florida, followed by Tulsa, Denver and Boston. The rest will come over the next nine days, with St. Paul being next to go on sale, Thursday morning (Pacific Standard Time). If the system remains the same, and face-value prices go as high for the on-sales to come, that could result in a lot of fan dismay to be staggered over the course of the next week and a half.