Incident on 48th Street: Inside the Springsteen Ticketmaster Verified Fan Ticket Sale

In 2016, Bruce Springsteen played 76 — mostly sold-out shows — to 2.4 million fans around the world. Everyone was happy. Bruce, the promoters, the fans, and even the scalpers. It was the top grossing concert tour of the year, pulling in some $268 million in ticket revenue.

This October, Springsteen will start a 90-night residency at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 48th Street, New York City. The venue holds 971 people. In total, Springsteen will talk and perform to approximately 80,000 fans, which is the equivalent of one night at the Met Life Stadium, NJ.

While the show will be an intimate night with one of the world’s greatest performers, it has one HUGE problem — it will be an intimate night with one of the world’s greatest performers.

And that means that only 0.03% of people that saw Bruce in 2016 will get the chance to see him on Broadway.

Photo Credit: Dana Distortion for Rolling Stone

With such huge demand, and very limited supply there can only be trouble — and trouble is what we got during the two ticket onsale windows that concluded yesterday. It was an Incident on 48th Street.

So, who you gonna call to help you navigate this delicate ticketing problem? Well, as always, Springsteen called Ticketmaster.

Before we talk about Ticketmaster it’s important to discuss the Secondary Ticket Market, which blights the entertainment industry.

Professional scalpers now employ bots to buy face value tickets so they can be resold at higher prices. As a marketplace — its perfect economics. When supply outstrips demand, the price goes up. It’s called capitalism.

However, it is also important to note that like taking performance-enhancing drugs in Sport, and tax avoidance — it is all perfectly legal if you know what you’re doing. And knowing what you’re doing usually involves having the money to have people help you walk up to the line, but never cross it.

The only issue with the Secondary Market is that like avoiding tax, or taking the best legal performance-enhancing drugs in sport is that it is morally questionable.

Back to Ticketmaster.

To address the risk of tickets appearing on the Secondary Market, Ticketmaster has introduced its Verified Fan process. A system that seeks to pre-qualify people ahead of tickets going on sale.

It’s also a system designed to reduce Ticketmaster’s bandwidth capacity issues when tickets go onsale, AND harvest even more of your personal data, but I digress.

It’s here that it’s important to register the success of the Verified Fan process.

(but I will get to its deficiencies shortly — don’t worry)

In total, between 3–5% of Springsteen on Broadway tickets have ended up on Stubhub. That means that approximately 95% of the 80,000 tickets that went on sale are now in the hands of Bruce Springsteen fans, which is good.

So, how does Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan process work?

Like many things in life it’s an algorithm, and what it does is attempt to identify which registrants Ticketmaster believes are likely to attend the show vs. likely to resell the tickets.

Actually how the ‘Fanscore’ algorithm works is a blackbox, but it certainly examines past purchase behaviour, which is a double-edged sword.

One on hand, if you buy lots of tickets with Ticketmaster for your family you may be in trouble. On the other if you only ever buy small amounts of tickets for a limited number of artists, you may be OK. Let’s imagine:

Your 12-year old daughter and her friends want to go see Disney on Ice. You buy 10 tickets. Your teenage son wants to see Metallica — you buy tickets for that tour. You like to go to lots of other shows with your friends — you buy more tickets. All of a sudden Ticketmaster’s computer is thinking — wait a minute, who is this guy?

This is how — as Chris Jordan reported — it seems that many fans that bought lots of tickets over the years were losing out.

However, the biggest mistake that Ticketmaster has made is in their Communication.

Why oh why did Ticketmaster, clumsily walk into a hornets nest of Springsteen fans, and tell them they were not Verified Fans?

I know — and everyone knows — that Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan process IS NOT a measure of peoples fan-dom. So why say it?

I’ve been a fan for 35+years, and I didn’t like being told by Ticketmaster that I could not be verified, and that I was on standby.

Why didn’t the folks at Ticketmaster think how that might play out?

Why not just say — there has been huge interest in this event, and we’re sorry that at this moment, you’re on standby — and if that changes we’ll let you know.

Do what airlines do — there is no need to kick someone on their way down with a poorly written communique. Just tell people — the flight is fully booked, and you’re on standby. Airlines don’t say: we don’t think you’re worthy of flying on this plane.

For this, Ticketmaster don’t deserve any sympathy. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

This was compounded by decisions either made by Ticketmaster or Bruce Springsteen to not give people put on Standby last week the first chance to get codes this week, AND to allow people who successfully bought first time around to buy again. Both decisions were crass.

Finally, back to Springsteen. I wrote previously on whether Bruce should charge $850 per ticket. One of the most repeated responses was: well, if the tickets were $100 scalpers would sell them for $1000, and I’d rather Bruce had that money than a scalper.

I respectfully disagree.

Thanks to Ticketmaster’s successful — if poorly communicated-Verified Fan process — 95% of those $100 tickets would be in Springsteen’s fan hands, not in the hands of scalpers.

The dilemma for fans would then be to sell or hold? And, that would really determine who’s a verified fan.