Boss Rips Ticketmaster for 'Scalping' Tickets

(AP) - A New Jersey congressman is demanding an investigation after Bruce Springsteen fans were unable to buy tickets from Ticketmaster's website—which promptly offered them more expensive tickets from a subsidiary. When tickets for Springsteen's Meadowlands show went on sale Monday, some fans attempting to buy them got an error message that shut them out. A TicketsNow ad offered tix for hundreds of dollars more than face value. More»

Deal with TicketMaster may help get handle on secondary market

(NEWSER) - The NFL has partnered with TicketMaster on a site allowing fans to buy and sell tickets themselves, USA Today reports. Sellers must adhere to relevant state laws, but ticket-holders may set their own value, with no limits on pricing over face value. The NFL estimates that of 22 million tickets sold for its games last season, 5-10% wound up scalped. More»

E Street Band opposites overcame a segregated genre

(NEWSER) - When America lost Clarence Clemons, it "lost an ideal." In the pairing of "Southern Baptist black" with "Jersey Shore white," Bruce Springsteen and Clemons gave life to "a cultural example of how the divides of race can come together over music," writes Timothy Egan in the New York Times . The two of them “projected a kind of joy that made it easy to believe that this mess of a country could get along." Rock once had many African-American stars—Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix—but "whites basically stole the genre," observes Egan. More»

Company will be more up-front ... but not cheaper

(NEWSER) - Ticketmaster has finally acknowledged the seemingly obvious: that its service fees are annoying and cause some people to abandon the ticket-buying process entirely. In the company’s new blog , CEO Nathan Hubbard attributes the universal hatred of service fees to the fact that buyers “don’t understand what the heck they are for." So he goes on to break down who and what some of the fees go to: "promoters, venues, teams, artists and, yes, ticketing companies." He also unveils the company’s new plan to be more up-front about the fees. More»

'Wiseguys' accused of using hackers to corner market on concert tickets

(NEWSER) - Four men who formed a company called "Wiseguy Tickets" have been charged with running a massive ticket-scalping scheme. Federal prosecutors say the Californians employed a team of Bulgarian computer programmers to help them access the systems of vendors like Ticketmaster and corner the market on tickets for some of the country's hottest concerts and sporting events, CNET reports. More»