PreferredSeat.com Blog

Bruce Springsteen it turns out withholds hundreds of tickets for his concerts, as do most artists apparently, but in his case the BOSS ACT was brought forth because of his complaining that ticket scalping was keeping the best seats out of the hands of fans at exhorbitant prices.

Yet as reported in the Wall Street Journal Blog, “Now comes word, courtesy of an Open Public Records Act request from the Newark Star-Ledger, that the biggest reason fans couldn’t find good seats had nothing to do with Ticketmaster, TicketsNow, or scalpers.
In reality, almost none were ever actually, y’know, on sale. Instead, 90% of the best seats were reserved for friends and family of the band, venue employees, record-label executives and their guests.”.

And NJ.com reported “But an examination of ticket sale data from the May 21 concert shows Springsteen himself may be part of the problem. The best seats in the house that night were the 1,126 seats in the four sections closest to the stage, but only 108 of those tickets were ever for sale to the public, according to new ticket data obtained through the Open Public Records Act.”

Now I may not be an expert in this, but I’ve seen a lot of “comp” (free) tickets in my 22 years as one of the owners of Preferred Seating Tickets and all of these were from friends, family, employees, radio station, etc who were given the prime tickets, for free, but that’s not what they sold them to us for. And I would assume that when an artist such as Bruce Springsteen prepares to go on tour and determine the face value of the tickets for the tour, that they must take into account the 1200 tickets given to these friends, family, employees, etc because they will get no revenue from them and someone else must cover that cost. So my question is, are ticket prices adjusted higher to make up for the 1200 tickets given to friends, family, etc so they may have the pleasure of sitting up front, and those fans that helped pay for those “comp” (free) prime up front seats, can watch from the rear of the concert venue or stand on the floor the entire show?

For the record I’ve been a big fan of Bruce Springsteen since the early 70′s. I have ticket stubs from the Born in the USA tour signed by the now deceased promoter Bill Graham, who had an equal hatred of scalpers or ticket resellers, but who I still admired and respected for his work, just as I do for Bruce Springsteen. But like most people who complain about the ticket resell business and ticket brokers, they have hidden profit motives or interests that they fail to disclose.