Photo Credit: Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez
The Bruce Springsteen fanzine ‘Backstreets’ is shutting down in protest of high ticket prices.
Springsteen adopted the dynamic pricing model for tickets for his upcoming tour. Now the fanzine says it can’t continue to cover Springsteen. “After 43 years of publishing in one form of another, by fans for fans of Bruce Springsteen, it’s with mixed emotions that we announce ‘Backstreets’ has reached the end of the road,” writes editor Christopher Phillips.
“If you read the editorial Backstreets published last summer in the aftermath of U.S. ticket sales, you have a sense of where our heads and hearts have been–dispirited, downhearted, and disillusioned. It’s not a feeling we’re at all accustomed to while anticipating a new Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour.”
“There’s no denying that the new ticket price range has in and of itself been a determining factor in our outlook as the 2023 tour approached—certainly in terms of the experience that hardcore fans have been accustomed to for, as Springsteen noted, for 49 years. Six months after the on-sales, we still faced this three-part predicament: These are concerts that we can hardly afford; that many of our readers cannot afford; and that a good portion of our readership has lost interest in as a result.”
Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing model resulted in ticket prices for the Springsteen tour fluctuating between $1,000 and $5,000. Many fans took to social media to decry the outrageous pricing—but The Boss seems okay with it. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he says he wanted to align his ticketing practices with the ‘industry standard.’
“What I do is a very simple thing. I tell my guys, ‘Go out and see what everybody else is doing. Let’s charge a little less,'” Springsteen said during that interview. “This time I told them, ‘Hey, we’re 73 years old. The guys are there. I want to do what everybody else is doing, my peers. So that’s what happened. That’s what they did. I know it was unpopular with some fans, but if there are any complaints on the way out—you can have your money back.”