The Bruce Springsteen fanzine Backstreets will shut down after 43 years.
The periodical, which has been covering the singer and his E Street Band since 1980, is set to shutter due to disillusionment over Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing model and what has been described as a “fan freeze out”.
Publisher and editor-in-chief Christopher Phillips wrote in an editorial: “After 43 years of publishing in one form or another, by fans for fans of Bruce Springsteen, it’s with mixed emotions that we announce Backstreets has reached the end of the road.
“We are immensely proud of the work Backstreets has done, and we are forever grateful to the worldwide community of fellow fans who have contributed to and supported our efforts all these years, but we know our time has come.
“If you read the editorial Backstreets published last summer in the aftermath of the U.S. ticket sales, you have a sense of where our heads and hearts have been: dispirited, downhearted, and, yes, disillusioned. It’s not a feeling we’re at all accustomed to while anticipating a new Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour…
“There’s no denying that the new ticket price range has in and of itself been a determining factor in our outlook as the 2023 tour approached — certainly in terms of the experience that hardcore fans have been accustomed to for, as Springsteen noted, 49 years. Six months after the onsales, we still faced this three-part predicament: These are concerts that we can hardly afford; that many of our readers cannot afford; and that a good portion of our readership has lost interest in as a result.”
Bruce previously defended ticket prices for his tours and insisted they were competitive.
He said: “So this tour, we said ‘Hey, the guys are in their 70s. I’m 73. Do what everybody else is doing who are my peers. They basically went out and there were a variety of things being done and that’s what they did. Most of my tickets are totally affordable. There is a very high range.
“Let’s say this: I can set the price of my tickets. I can’t set their value — and so there are tickets that get valued at that amount of money and go for that amount of money all of the time and that money gets sucked up by the ticket brokers. I said, ‘Hey, let’s have the money go to the guys who are sweating up on stage for three hours.’ If that’s controversial for you, I don’t know what to say.”