SeatGeek is facing a backlash from ticket resellers after stringently limiting any purchaser to two seats each for the upcoming Springsteen On Broadway residency.
SeatGeek was the primary seller for the veteran rocker’s 30 shows this summer at the St James Theatre after becoming the partner of Jujamycn Theaters earlier this year.
Prior to tickets going on sale for the run, SeatGeek posted rules specifying that only two tickets could be purchased by any single person for the entire run of the show, and to make the purchase the account name, credit card and billing address all had to match.
Ticket resellers, who often bypass such rules, attempted to buy tickets in bulk but were told their transactions were unsuccessful, according to a report in Forbes from YoSeats founder and resale market proponent Eric Fuller. Indeed, he suggests Jujamycn Theaters and SeatGeek conspired to reject particular purchases.
Fuller suggested that this decision is a serious risk to SeatGeek’s supply chain within the resale market, but is perhaps an expected consequence of its interests in both primary and secondary ticketing, which will sometimes clash.
“As the majority of SeatGeek’s revenue still comes from their resale of tickets, irritating suppliers is dangerous,” Fuller wrote in Forbes.
“All it would take to really wake up SeatGeek would be a decision which I’m hearing discussed among their ticket supplying partners to enter the term “-SeatGeek” into their point-of-sale systems and SeatGeek would be instantly irrelevant as a resale marketplace. That simple “-SeatGeek” entry would wipe out the inventory from SeatGeek’s resale platform and their revenues would plummet immediately.”
The absence of reseller purchases means tickets remain for all 30 of Springsteen’s shows, which run from late June to September. Fuller described this as a “major failure” for an artist of Springsteen’s standing.
SeatGeek defended its actions in a response to Fuller’s queries about the Springsteen on-sale.
The company said: “SeatGeek strives to build a better ticketing experience for all parts of the live event ecosystem. This past week’s Springsteen on Broadway on-sale was no exception. We put together a successful on-sale that respected Jujamcyn’s desire to put tickets in the hands of real fans with a two ticket per person limit, which matched the exceptionally high demand we saw for this first full capacity event on Broadway since the pandemic began in March 2020.”
Image: Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash
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