#springsteenonbroadway

On Broadway

Last night (10/24) at Springsteen on Broadway, the old adage “Not all Springsteen fans from New Jersey are total assholes but all fans who are total assholes are from New Jersey” was self effectuated by the people who thought this was the right moment to have their personal conversations with Bruce Springsteen or share their trenchant observations with their seatmates WHILE BRUCE IS TALKING.

This is not Christic. This is not Somerville. This is not the Joad tour, this is not even Devils & Dust. It is not a standard Bruce show or a standard rock and roll show and if you cannot comport yourself like a decent human with some semblance of common courtesy, you should not go to this show.

THERE ARE SPOILERS HERE, SO DON’T READ IT IF YOU WANT TO BE UNSPOILED

ME ME ME Asshole #1:

This individual was several rows behind me in the orchestra, so his seat was not inexpensive. I arrived around 7:20pm, and between 7:20pm and curtain, he bellowed “BROOOOCCCEEEEE” about every 7-10 minutes, as well as offered various other commentary so that we all knew how important a fan he was: e.g.,”THIS PLACE IS ALMOST AS SMALL AS HARRY’S ROADHOUSE.” 

When the show started, this person thought he was the only one in the audience and he would yell his responses back at Bruce. Bruce starts talking about how he lives 10 minutes from where he grew up, dude yells “YOU CAME BACK.” this went on until he was shushed by his neighbors, but not before he came roaring back during the story about going with his mother to pull his father out of the bar, which is sad and tragic and definitely not something you yell during. This individual, however, offered the pithy, “YOU’RE LUCKY HE DIDN’T SMACK YOU” *as Bruce was trying to finish that part of the show*.

Bruceloops Asshole #2:

One of the show’s vignettes discusses Vietnam, and it is deeply honest and moving and very frank about Bruce’s ambivalence at having not been chosen. He says something about how he’s glad that he wasn’t chosen, and this woman decides that this is her time to make it all about her, and she yells, ‘SO AM I!”

Clap Along Assholes:

Don’t clap. Don’t think you get to clap all by yourself because you are A BETTER FAN AND YOU ARE CLAPPING! When y’all tried to do it en masse at the end of the show because you clearly cannot sit still for five seconds, Bruce stopped the goddamn song and said, “Thanks, I got it.” And yet that one lone clapping person behind me STILL felt they needed to clap. 

Talking Assholes #2:

THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING YOU HAVE TO SAY TO YOUR SEATMATE OR GIRLFRIEND OR HUSBAND OR BFF FROM BTX OR THAT FACEBOOK GROUP THAT NEEDS TO BE SAID IN THE MIDDLE OF BRUCE’S MONOLOGUES OR DURING THE QUIETER ACOUSTIC NUMBERS. YOU KNOW EVERYONE COULD HEAR YOU WHISPER AND YET YOU KEPT FUCKING DOING IT. IT’S TWO HOURS AND FIFTEEN MINUTES. YOU CAN STFU FOR THE DURATION OF THAT TIME AND GO HAVE A DRINK OR GO TO FUCKING OLIVE GARDEN AFTERWARDS AND DEBRIEF. SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU FUCKING PEOPLE? 

Rebel Asshole #1

This isn’t a rock and roll show. You don’t get to stand up for the entire show because you can’t sit down at a Bruce Springsteen show!!!11111 When 959 people are sitting and you are the only one insisting on standing, what is the thought process that goes through your head that justifies continuing to be a jerk? Do you think Bruce is going to stop the show, put the guitar down, walk into the audience, and shake your hand for DEFYING THE ESTABLISHMENT?

Personal, to all assholes

Disclaimer: Yes, I got tickets. I am really effing lucky.

When the rumor of this engagement first surfaced, my first thought was “Oh no.” Not because I don’t want to see Bruce in a small theater or doing a Storytellers/Somerville/Christic for the masses, but because 1) There would be no way to go every night, which would mean that Bruce is playing in my city and I can’t be there, and 2) It was going to be expensive.

Before they even announced a price range, I looked at my budget and decided what I could afford/what I would forgo to buy a ticket and determined a price range. I discussed this avidly with friends, some of whom decided they would just go for the highest priced ticket because they felt there would be less competition. Other friends were at the other end of the spectrum and could only afford the lowest priced ticket. And yet other friends made the call that they were going to sit this out and hope for a tape, that the combination of what would undoubtedly be a high priced event plus travel and hotel was something they could not do or were unwilling to do.

I asked every friend I knew if they weren’t going to please sign up for Verified Fan in case I did not get a code. (No one did, fwiw.) I also connected with my Bruce peeps (as the kids say) and had a reasonable sense of confidence that if someone in that circle got a code and I didn’t, I would get offered something at some point during the run (which happened, a friend offered me his second before offering it to his wife, who is a big fan but not a crazy fan). And as a backup, I do live in NYC and have the advantage that I could invest some time into looking for a miracle if I got shut out. There might be drops; there are always people whose companion gets sick. There are ways.

But I didn’t just expect to get a code and do nothing to plan around the possibility that I might not get one, which seems to be what many people yelling on the Internet did (or didn’t, rather.)

The Actual On Sale

If you are not constantly buying tickets for concerts, you do not have a barometer as to what is a disaster and what is just a tough on sale. I know people think that the Broadway sale was a disaster but the fact is that it was not. It was just a tough sale.

I have done Verified Fan five times now. With the first three, something major went wrong: I didn’t get the code and had to find it on the registration website, the code didn’t work, there was no place on the website to input the code.

This is why I did a practice run for Verified Fan for the latest batch of Hamilton tickets that were put on sale for the NYC production, because I felt like this would be a VF sale that Ticketmaster would not want to fuck up. (I would have liked to see the show again but that $250 was needed for my Springsteen ticket budget.)

The behavior of the website during the Hamilton Verified Fan was equal to the behavior of the website during the Springsteen sale. Even with that practice, during the Bruce on sale I panicked and ended up buying what was supposed to be a backup pull on my phone and now have to sell tickets to another concert because I picked a random date and forgot I already had a show that night. And I buy tickets all the time to shows of all different sizes at all different venues with varying levels of urgency.

If you weren’t successful buying tickets, ask yourself:  how often you do this? Ask yourself, were you absolutely ready for the sale? Did you have the code already copied into notepad? Did you have your phone on Do Not Disturb so your mom didn’t text you in the middle of the sale? Did you run a speed test on your internet connection to make sure you had the amount of bandwidth that you pay for? Did you reboot your router the night before? I don’t want to be “Maybe y’all don’t know how to buy tickets” but based on a lot of the complaints I saw online, I think some people do not know how to buy tickets for a high pressure event and were woefully unprepared. People complained that they couldn’t afford the tickets they were offered but how many people threw them back and tried again? (Because that worked.)

“Verified Fan is Bullshit and didn’t work!!!111”

This statement is just plain wrong. Right now, on Stub Hub, there are on average only 2% of the house available on a per-night basis. That doesn’t account for what already sold on StubHub, but the ratio is consistent enough across the entire run that it can’t be some kind of coincidence. There were roughly 77k tickets available for the entire run (without accounting for VIP or lottery).

This is a very good ratio. It is not suddenly mathematically invalid because you couldn’t afford what was offered or you didn’t win the initial lottery selection to be able to purchase. (I’ll get to the price point later.)

The fact that you did not get a code to buy tickets does not mean that this was a disaster. It is exactly the same as not getting tickets during an onsale. You just got eliminated before the ticket purchasing part of the process. This is what we are not used to. But being unaccustomed to a new process does not mean the process did not work.

But why couldn’t they just send everyone codes???111

Because they did not have enough inventory and all it would have done is created a situation. One of the critical things Verified Fan accomplishes is creating a firewall-type effect that prevents the bots from flooding the servers so that they can buy all the tickets in the first 10 minutes. This is the kind of thing that happened when U2 played Madison Square Garden in 2015. Those shows were genuine on-sale disasters because no one could get through, period.

(And please do not hold up U2 as a thing that Bruce should do [setting aside his vocal dislike of fan clubs] because for the most recent tour if you weren’t a fan club member, Ticketmaster was upselling fan club memberships on the sale page for each show--”Do you want to buy tickets ahead of everyone! Just join the fan club right now!” And it is too late for Bruce to take on the Ten Club model.)

What Ticketmaster undoubtedly did was hand out codes in the quantity that matched the amount of tickets that were available. When there were still tickets left (probably because people rejected the price or the location, or only bought one ticket) they then released additional codes to standbys.

The fact that you could still pull tickets in a 975-capacity theater one hour into the on sale means that Verified Fan worked.

A limited inventory of 77,025 tickets in total (and that’s without deducting for VIP or lottery) doesn’t even come close to covering the Springsteen fanbase in the Tri-state area, let alone extended areas (Boston/Philly), the rest of the US, and definitely was never going to include Europe. (Also, Europeans, if you haven’t stopped to consider that this might be coming over to you, you are not thinking clearly, given that Bruce makes exponentially more money in Europe than he does in the US.)

There was no way on God’s green earth that everyone in the core fan base was going to get tickets! A lot of people were going to get shut out. There was simply insufficient stock. Period.

Pricing

I grew up on musical theater. I was a drama club kid. But I also remember the point at which I realized that I had to choose between going to the theater and going to concerts because the theater was insanely expensive, and the work to get the cheap tickets required more time than I was willing to devote to the pursuit.

Theater tickets for productions that are in-demand are not cheap; small show runs are not cheap. The Walter Kerr holds 975. (The Richard Rogers, where Hamilton is playing, holds 1300.)

Given that $75 balcony tickets are selling -- and they are selling --- on StubHub for $1000 a seat, Jon Landau and Bruce and whoever helped them price this run were 100% on target. In fact, to be perfectly honest, looking at the secondary market action, they probably underpriced the seats.

I am not thrilled with an $850 ticket price point. I am not thrilled with a $400 price point. But there is zero doubt that Bruce Springsteen can command that level of ticket price, and I would rather see him pocket the cash than a ticket broker. Don’t throw “Well so much for his image as the advocate of the working man” at me. If that was true he would’ve had $25 seats in the upper level for years instead of pricing every seat the same. I can argue this point until the cows come home. There are so many things that could have been done over the years to make the shows more affordable to a wider range of people, but no one cared about that until they suddenly couldn’t afford a ticket. 

The argument “How much money does he need?” is invalid. I don’t like someone telling me how much I should be making, and if you’ve read Born To Run, you will understand...a few things. 

The argument “WELL ONLY HIS RICH FANS WILL GO TO SEE THIS THEN” is farcical coming from people who regularly see multiple shows on a tour. If you can’t afford it, well, you can’t afford it. I know it sucks to not be able to afford something you usually can afford. There is a larger conversation here about economic inequities and the availability of entertainment, but that’s why I know people who will never go see a concert in an arena or a stadium. That conversation, while valid, is not specific to Bruce Springsteen or this engagement.

The plain and simple fact is that Bruce Springsteen has underpriced his seats since the Reunion tour. His peers have been commanding more for decades now. Bruce never went the Irving Azoff/Eagles route where they create a carefully crafted maze of multiple levels of VIP seating designed to maximize profits. Bruce never did Golden Circle the way most legacy artists do these days. For years, they left so much money on the table, while the secondary market cleaned up. They tried to battle the scalpers with the jailbait seats and then by going GA floor. The price crept up on the last tour, but so has gas / insurance / salaries / production and the like. And, again, it was still drastically underpriced.

Have you bought tickets to the Rolling Stones? To Paul McCartney? The Who? Madonna? And these are people playing stadiums and arenas, not 975 seat theaters. Those are not cheap tickets. (Please do not start with ‘They cannot hold a candle to Bruce Springsteen!!!111” because that is just such a basic argument.)

I know these prices seem crazy compared to what we are used to paying, but they are not crazy for what this is. Yes, only Hamilton is this crazy, but this is better than Hamilton (with apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda).

I need to point out: I was flat broke during the Seeger Sessions tour. I saw one show as a result. That was what I could afford to do. I was also in a precarious financial position when the GOTJ shows were announced and only saw two shows (and only saw that second because someone offered to drive me). It sucks to not be able to afford things you used to be able to afford. I offer this because of all the dudes sliding into my TL yammering about rich people.

Things That Could Have Been Done Better

Communication: This is not anywhere near Ticketmaster’s first Verified Fan sale and they could have done a much much better job in communicating clearly about the process. They didn’t tell you what to do if you were verified but didn’t get a code, for example, until people started to complain on Twitter. They could have been more precise in telling people when the code would arrive--e.g. “You should have the code when you wake up on Wednesday and if you don’t, contact us at this address.”

The language in the emails for people on Standby was vague and ambiguous, and created a great deal of uncertainty. I’m not sure that they needed to say “we were unable to verify you” because I’m not sure that actually happened. I think the standby people just didn’t get randomly selected and saying “Sorry, you weren’t chosen as part of our random selection process but you are on standby and if more tickets open up you will be notified” would have been clearer and more accurate and stopped the childish tantrums from grown ass adults about “how dare you say I’m not a real fan.”

Second Run of Shows: It is a very very common practice to hold back dates to see what demand is, and also to thwart resellers, so the whining that all the dates weren’t announced at once is just that, whining. This is an area, however, where Ticketmaster just made a huge mess of things. They should have put the tickets on sale right away and opened it up to everyone who had already registered and didn’t get tickets. Holding it off by a week just gave the scalpers time to regroup.

They also did not make it clear if you needed to register again -- I saw one FAQ saying you didn’t, and another saying you did -- and while it was not exactly fair that it was an open playing field to everyone again, once they delayed it by a week they had to let everyone in. But I’m still not clear about what actually happened here and who was eligible for the second run.

This part of it was messy, but I don’t know of a lot of people who got selected for the first batch who made the cut for the second batch, and I do know many people who were on standby for #1 who got picked for #2.

For this I’m willing to declare the communication botched but the sales went okay, especially since the scalpers were bitching they couldn’t get tickets, and if you look on StubHub, there are less tickets available for the second batch than the first one, so that seems to back that up.

Codes For The First Sale Weren’t Linked To Accounts: One of the keys to the Verified Fan system is that the code you receive is both linked to the URL that you are sent to (which I suspect points to a batch of servers outside the regular TM infrastructure, but I don’t know that for sure) and to your Ticketmaster account. This way, you can’t just create 300 accounts and hand off codes to whomever. Ticketmaster fixed this for the second sale but it is, apparently, how so many scalpers got tickets to the first run. (This information comes from a scalper who had an open conversation with Chris Phillips of Backstreets on Twitter, and also maps to what I heard from other sale participants.)

Purchase Restrictions: Everyone is screaming about the lack of restrictions on these tickets but you’re not thinking this through.

Thanks to scalpers lobbying the state legislature, paperless tickets are not allowed in New York. Yes, I know there is discussion about changing that law, but right now that is the law on the books, and it doesn’t just change because it’s Bruce Springsteen. (Write letters to your elected representatives if you are a New York State voter.)

The problem when you make an $850 purchase non-transferrable is that it’s a lot of money to ask someone to just throw away when their kid gets sick. There are many unforeseen situations in which someone needs to be able to sell a ticket to someone else. It really, really sucks to eat the price of a ticket because you have a legitimate reason to not make the show and can’t transfer the ticket to someone else.

Names on tickets do not mean anything. Scalpers will buy a pair, sell a single, and escort the buyer in. And, again, you can’t make an $850 ticket non-transferrable.

There are scenarios in which it is reasonable to make tickets will-call only and that you must enter the venue immediately upon picking up the ticket. While you can do that for a small surprise one-off club or theater show, enforcing that for every single night of a multi-week Broadway run is simply not that kind of situation where that requirement will be practical. It puts a unnecessarily high burden on the venue and on the attendees. (C’mon, the FAQ for the shows has to mention that there will be snacks available. Somehow this was not the first question I had.)

Allow resale at face value only: There is precedent for this in the marketplace. The Newport Folk Festival, for example, doesn’t send out passes until right before the event to cut down on the secondary market, but provides a face-value resale system where you in effect sell your tickets to the ticketing company and they resell the pass. I spent $250 to go to Newport, I couldn’t go, I resold my pass for what I paid for it, someone else got to go. This is a thing that JLM could have done. Ticketmaster is not incented to do this because they make money off of reselling. There is a major conflict of interest here. There was weight that could have been thrown around here if someone had thought to do it. (Or, they thought about doing it and didn’t bother.)

No One Deserves A Ticket

If I had not gotten a ticket I would have started hustling. Period. I’m not entitled to a ticket any more than you are, or vice versa. I don’t care how many times you’ve seen Bruce. I don’t care how long you’ve been a fan. There is no purity test. This is a lame argument and also is not going to get you a ticket. In fact the number of times you have seen him should actually disqualify you. Give someone else a shot.

AND DON’T BRING YOUR KIDS TO THIS PERFORMANCE. FFS.

You Always Have The Option To Sit This One Out

This is actually a corollary of #5. Just because your favorite artist is doing a thing doesn’t mean you have to go if you can’t get there / can’t afford it / can’t get time off work / your kids have a thing / your Dad isn’t well / you just got a promotion. I know what it feels like to have to pass up what seems like something amazing, but you can’t go to every show (a thing I’m fond of reminding friends, as well as myself) and you will just make yourself crazy. It is okay to say, I can’t afford it, it’s too much money. It doesn’t make you less of a fan.

Well, What Should I Do?

Start asking everyone you know. Network your Springsteen friends. Network anyone who might have a connection. Put a post on BTX or your Facebook group. Keep apprised of what’s going on so you know if there’s a drop or a lottery type situation (which it looks like there is going to be). Can you get to NYC any weeknight and look for a miracle? Look on the secondary market for something (that’s how I finally got to see Hamilton, fwiw). There will be honest people who can’t go who are reselling for face, but the scalpers watch StubHub for those too.

Beware of fake listings on resale sites. Do not let your drive to get into this show get you ripped off. It can happen to the best of us. During the U2 MSG run in 2015, so many people got hoodwinked by fake floor tickets being sold by dudes on Craigslist. Do not buy on the street. Buy from a site with a guarantee, use a credit card that has some kind of consumer protection as a benefit, and if it seems too good to be true it probably is. StubHub is safer than most because they require a credit card to list and they put a hold on that credit card for the price of the sale, but this is not an endorsement, this is a statement of fact. Caveat emptor.