CHAPEL HILL, NC (CelebrityAccess) — Backstreets, the long-running Bruce Springsteen fanzine, announced that after 30 years, it is shutting down due to the rock icon’s high ticket prices.
“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. If you haven’t yet read that editorial (“Freeze-out,” July 24, 2022), or the crux of Springsteen’s response to Rolling Stone in November, we encourage you to do so; we don’t want to rehash those issues, but we stand behind our positions and points,” Backstreet Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Christopher Phillips wrote in an editorial announcing his decision to cease publishing.
Phillips went on to note that longtime fans and friends have expressed similar sentiments in letters in recent months and stated that readership of the fanzine has declined as well.
“Regardless, 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,” Phillips wrote.
In July, Phillips penned an editorial that suggested that fans had been “thrown to the wolves” after tickets to Bruce Springsteen’s latest tour went for sky high prices of as much as $4,000 due to Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system that adjusts ticket prices in response to demand.
“This so-called premium, algorithm-driven model violates an implicit contract between Bruce Springsteen and his fans, one in which the audience side of the equation appeared to truly matter – and in fact was crucial,” he wrote in the July editorial.
Despite the end of the line for Backstreets, Phillips said he is still a fan of Bruce Springsteen.
“Know that we’re not burning our fan cards, nor encouraging anyone else to do so. In fact, as diehard music fans, we have every hope of rekindling enthusiasm for what we’ve always believed to be a peerless body of work. If any of this is to reflect on Bruce Springsteen here at the end of our run, we’d like it to be that his extraordinary artistry inspired an extraordinary fan response that lasted for 43 years. That’s extraordinary,” he said.
