Bruce Springsteen's "Working On A Dream" topped the weekly album charts with 224,000 first week sales according to Nielson Soundscan. But his concert fans were at the center of a controversy sparked by a Ticketmaster campaign pointing buyers to higher priced seats at their own resales broker TicketsNow even while regular seats were still available.
The fans and Springsteen camp cried fowl. "Some artists or managers may not perceive there to be a conflict between having the distributor of their tickets in effect 'scalping' those same tickets through a secondary company like TicketsNow - we do," the boss and his team wrote on his site and went on to openly oppose the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
"The one thing that would make the current ticket situation even worse for the fan than it is now would be Ticketmaster and Live Nation coming up with a single system, thereby returning us to a near monopoly situation in music ticketing," wrote Springsteen and manager Jon Landau. "Several newspapers are reporting on this story right now. If you, like us, oppose that idea, you should make it known to your representatives."
Those following the merger talks also saw the incident as a reminder of just how tricky running a vertically integrated concert, ticket and management company might be. New Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff tried to calm the tempest with this letter:
An Open Letter of Apology to Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau and the entire Springsteen Tour Team:
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