Springsteen Shows: Who Gets Best Seats? Not You

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 to Bruce Springsteen's May concerts in New Jersey had nothing to do with Ticketmaster, TicketsNow, or scalpers. In reality, almost none were ever actually 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.

Of the 20,000 seats at the May 21 show, 2,262, or 12%, were withheld from public sale by various interested parties, including public agency that runs the venue (hence the public-records act request). The paper noted that under New Jersey law, only 5% are allowed to be set aside. Of those, 1,450 were held for friends and family of Springsteen and his band, plus radio-station executives and the like; 812 were held by the New Jersey Sports and Exhibition Authority. And they weren’t exactly in the nosebleed section. Of the 1,126 seats closest to the stage, only 108 were officially listed for sale to the public.

~Wall Street Journal

MP: Ticket scalpers and re-sale markets often get the blame for high ticket prices for concerts, but it appears that the artists and promoters are at least partly responsible for creating ticket shortages and high prices by withholding the best seats for themselves.