Ticketmaster agreed to pay $350,000 to Springsteen fans after redirecting potential ticket buyers to their subsidiary website, TicketsNow, offering tickets at a substantially higher price during a sale for two upcoming concerts in May. Over 2,000 fans filed complaints with the New Jersey Attorney General’s office following the event, which also prompted a negative response from Springsteen and his management company. Along with the compensation, TicketsNow changed their policy, which has been promoted with a special message on their website stating that they will only allow postings for ticket sales after the initial sale begins. Following the policy change, there was an immediate impact upon the traffic being driven to TicketsNow from TicketMaster, where the downstream traffic declined from 3.75% for the week ending Jan. 31, 2009 to just under 1% last week.

Of course it is pretty common to look for tickets on the websites of resellers once the tickets have sold out or seats are unavailable. The ticketing websites in Ticketmaster’s downstream for the week ending Feb 21, 2009 confirms this type of cross-shopping behavior, typically dependent upon which ticket outlets were handling the main sale and where else tickets were available. Also worth noting is that Ticketmaster is doing a good job keeping traffic within their own network with 5 (possibly 6 if the merger with LiveNation is approved) out of the 10 ticketing websites in the downstream are subsidiaries or partners of Ticketmaster.