The feud between Ticketmaster and the Boss, one Bruce Springsteen, ESQ., is heating up as Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau, has called out the Newark Star Ledger and Ticketmaster Chairman Barry Diller over a story that reported that Springsteen's camp held back 2,300 tickets for friends of the band, allegedly leading fans to have to purchase over-priced tickets on TicketsNow.
The story begins back in February, when word came to the Boss that his fans were getting bait-and-switched by Ticketmaster when trying to buy tickets for a show at the Izod Center because they were redirected to TicketsNow, a different site owned by Ticketmaster that had huge markups on the tickets. The Boss cried foul, but nothing really came of it, except for Ticketmaster said it was a technical snafu.
That was until last week when the Newark Star Ledger reported that 2,300 tickets were held back by the Boss, and while Ticketmaster chairman Diller said that it wasn't necessarily the Boss' fault that his fans were getting stiffed, but that hey, Springsteen held back a bunch of tickets, so he's kinda sorta to blame.
Landau lashed out yesterday, writing in a release that Diller was out of line by claiming the 2,300 held tickets had anything to do with Ticketmaster's technical issues. And he's right. Here's what Landau wrote:
"(It) had nothing to do at all with the breakdown of Ticketmaster's system." When fans were redirected to TicketsNow, "an undetermined but large amount of money flowed into TicketsNow (and eventually Ticketmaster) even though there were still tickets at normal prices yet to be made available on Ticketmaster. We perceived this to have been a major abuse of our fans, complained about it mightily, and added that because of behavior like this, the pending merger of the number one ticketing company and number one management company (both owned by Ticketmaster) with the number one venue owner and operator (Live Nation) might not be such a hot idea."
Landau also wrote that Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff called and apologized for Diller's comments, and that large ticket holds in metropolitan areas are standard practice. Landau also kept his eye on making sure Ticketmaster takes the fall, saying that it is unacceptable for fans to get taken.
I'm not sure what the next move is, considering this isn't really the worst thing that's ever happened regarding Ticketmaster, but really, how long can that company keep going like this? It's like they don't care at all about how they're perceived. [Billboard]
