Bruce Springsteen talks Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing & $5000 tickets

Before Taylor Swift‘s big ticketing snafu was making headlines, Bruce Springsteen found himself in the hot seat earlier this year as platinum tickets to his shows topped out at $5000 due to Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” system. The subject came up again when Bruce gave an interview with Rolling Stone about his new covers album, Only the Strong Survive:

Rolling Stone: It caused a bit of an uproar in the fan community because some of the tickets used dynamic prices, and some tickets hit $5,000. Did you know in advance about those price points and dynamic pricing, and do you have any regrets about that?

Bruce Springsteen: 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.” That’s generally the directions. They go out and set it up. For the past 49 years or however long we’ve been playing, we’ve pretty much been out there under market value. I’ve enjoyed that. It’s been great for the fans.

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 [laughs].

But ticket buying has gotten very confusing, not just for the fans, but for the artists also. And the bottom line is that most of our tickets are totally affordable. They’re in that affordable range. We have those tickets that are going to go for that [higher] price somewhere anyway. The ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money. I’m going, “Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?”

It created an opportunity for that to occur. And so at that point, we went for it. I know it was unpopular with some fans. But if there’s any complaints on the way out, you can have your money back.

RS also asked Bruce if he’d avoid using dynamic pricing in the future, and he replied, “I don’t know. I think in the future, we’ll be talking about it, of course [laughs]. It changes from tour to tour. We will be coming back. I’m sure we’ll be playing outside somewhat. That’ll be a whole other discussion when that comes around. I don’t want to say anything now, but we’ll see what happens.” Read the interview in full on Rolling Stone.

Taylor Swift released a new statement about her ticketing fiasco, and Ticketmaster defended themselves, saying they sold over 2 million tickets for Taylor’s shows on Tuesday, “the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day.”