NEW JERSEY (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — Belfast resident and Bruce Springsteen fan Ann Gorman was determined to secure tickets for herself and her nephew for the December Belfast date on the Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band tour. Logging into Ticketmaster 15 minutes before the 9AM onsale time she was astonished to discover that they were sold out almost immediately after being posted, and then infuriated to find tickets for the show on sale on eBay almost immediately after.
"I said I would get tickets for my nephew but then decided to go to the gig myself as well," Gorman told the Belfast Register "I know it was 9am, because the news had just started, and yet I was told the tickets had all sold out. But there they were on eBay for £200. I can't understand how so many tickets were sold when they were only supposed to be on sale at 9am. I'm curious to find out how this happened and how many tickets were actually made available online by Ticketmaster."
Its not just Belfast either, this growing trend sees tickets being snapped up by speculators instead of fans who then post tickets on secondary ticket reseller sites like StubHub for steep markups. A brief glance at eBay shows tickets for U.S. dates that aren't even on sale yet going for 8-900 dollars for a pair. Similar results can be found on secondary ticket market site StubHub.com and when combined with the increasingly high cost of purchasing a ticket from a primary vendor, fans are being left increasingly on the outside, looking in.
Some efforts are being made to counter this effect however. When the Police came to Boston's Fenway Park, a cache tickets were released scant hours ahead of the show, in an effort to circumvent the resellers. While this is a good start, it does little to address a growing problem that could have significant ramifications for the live touring industry, a sector that is increasingly important as record sales continue to slump. – CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
