Bruce Springsteen likes to boast about his working class roots, but fans are now abandoning The Boss in droves as ticket prices for his upcoming tour have soared as high $5,000.
In a sign of how bad things have gotten, the Bruce Springsteeen fanzine Backstreets has announced it is shutting down operations after 43 years, with its publisher and editor-in-chief saying fans have lost interest because they can no longer afford to buy tickets.
Christopher Phillips, who has led the fan publication since 1998, said his staff had been “dispirited, downhearted, and, yes, disillusioned” over ticket prices.
“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,” he wrote in an editorial note.
https://t.co/TCDJkGYZuC pic.twitter.com/pwpROJ8ggP
— Backstreets Magazine (@backstreetsmag) February 3, 2023
The source of the acrimony is Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing algorithm, which allows tickets to be priced based on consumer demand.
Though dynamic pricing has been around for years, the price for concerts has soared to astronomical levels for the most popular artists, resulting in sticker shock for even the most diehard fans who are willing to splurge on their favorite performers.
Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation Entertainment, is already under Congressional scrutiny following the Taylor Swift debacle that saw service outages and and long wait times.
As Breitbart News reported, Springsteen could have taken action to work around Ticketmaster’s virtual monopoly on ticket sales, but has so far chosen not to do so.
Springsteen appeared to brush off his fans’ revolt in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.
“You don’t like to be criticized. You certainly don’t like to be the poster boy for high ticket prices. That’s the last thing you prefer to be. But that’s how it went,” he said. “You have to own the decisions you have made and go out and just continue to do your best.”
“You don’t like to be criticized”: #Springsteen addresses the cost to see the Boss with @greeneandy for @RollingStone, including a direct response to our 7/4/22 “Freeze-out” editorial (https://t.co/zbDygQpzwQ). Thoughts? https://t.co/OEH0jcEE7P pic.twitter.com/sI4WPda7WA
— Backstreets Magazine (@backstreetsmag) November 18, 2022
Springsteen was a vehement anti-Trump activist and endorsed Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election.
The rocker even helped push The Atlantic‘s discredited report that President Trump called American servicemen “losers” and “suckers” in an anti-Trump campaign ad he made with novelist-screenwriter-activist Don Winslow.
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com