Working on a Scheme?

So Bruce Springsteen thinks Ticketmaster & Live Nation are engaging in questionable business practices. Nothing to argue with there...they are. In my humble opinion, so are brokers like StubHub who buy up the best tickets for concerts & sporting events and then immediately try to resell them at three or four times their face value...

However, as a recent article in Billboard Magazine points out, there may be some indirect hypocrisy being put forth by Springsteen and his reps. In the piece written by Ray Waddell & quoting sources in The Newark Star Ledger, Bruce’s uber-controlling manager Jon Landau claims that there’s nothing wrong with holding 90% (yes, 90%) of the best seats at a Springsteen concert for friends & industry pimps. In the same breath, he then has the audacity to rail against Ticketmaster for “bait-and-switch” maneuvers. Both parties are deeply at fault here, but Ticketmaster has never claimed to be anything other than a business purely concerned with maxing out profit. On the other hand, Springsteen has always claimed to be our rock & roll savior, a New Jersey siren who will help lead us to the promised land...

What does it all boil down to? Ticketmaster is the devil we know. Bruce Springsteen is the dusty devil we don’t, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. He pretends to be ‘one of us’ but is so far removed from the dealings of everyday life that he has become, like Bono & Eddie Vedder, a talented musician who purports to be a commoner but is actually a pampered prince. Ironically, The Boss’ moral decline can be traced directly back to the mammoth success of his “working man” megahit, “Born in the U.S.A.”; after selling tens of millions of records while singing about the loss of the American Dream, Springsteen became that which he (supposedly) abhorred…a narrow-minded, money-grubbing charlatan who talks out of both sides of his soul-patch-adorned mouth...

(And don’t even get me started on that piece of crap Bruce put out earlier this year, his love letter to Barack Obama called “Working on a Dream”. If you plunked down $10 for a copy, then surprise, surprise…you just flushed your money down the toilet for an album that is embarrassing and insultingly sophomoric both musically and lyrically)

Meet the new Boss. Much, much worse than the old Boss.

(For the full picture concerning the Springsteen camp’s battle with Ticketmaster, check out Ray Waddell’s article at http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/springsteen-ticketmaster-war-escalates-1003986457.story#)