Look at how Ticketmaster’s price gouging AI is manipulating concert ticket prices through the roof!

Bruce Springsteen fans like to think of him as tougher than the rest, not pricier than the rest. So there were inevitable eruptions of anger when fans logged on for the first day of sales for the opening shows on his 2023 arena tour and found tickets going for as as $4,000-5,000 for mid-range floor seats, and into the four-figures for other, less desirable tickets that remained. If these were being offered on the secondary market, offers that exorbitant might be expected… but what gave fans sticker shock was that these were face value tickets, with no middleman jacking up the price.

It was an introduction for many fans to Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” program, in which “platinum tickets” — which may be placed anywhere in the arena, from the front section to the back rows — fluctuate in price, in what is said to be ongoing reaction to demand. The system lets ticket prices quickly rise to a level it’s believed resellers would get for them, keeping that extra money in-house for the artist and promoter. But as Wednesday’s ticket sales went on and went up, even some concert veterans who know and accept the idea of variable pricing wondered: Would even scalpers ask close to $5,000 for a good but not directly front-of-house seat?

Fan ire was quickly evident in responses to an early tweet from Backstreets, the Springsteen fan magazine, which posted a screenshot of the price for one seat on for the tour’s opening night and wondered: “Tampa mid-floor for $4,400, anyone?” (That’s an amount that included $3,819 in face value plus $569.50 in fees.) Other perturbed fans quickly joined in with screenshots of the unusually costly offers they were getting, once they’d gone through Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system and waited in an online queue.

variety.com/2022/music/news/bruce-springteen-ticketmaster-ticket-prices-rise-thousands-dynamic-pricing-1235321657/