Here at CL, we've done our share of ragging on Ticketmaster. Over the years a few major stars have had the balls to step up and rise against the agency's monopoly (Pearl Jam comes to mind). The latest naysayer is Bruce Springsteen, who caught wind that Ticketmaster was redirecting customers to its secondary site, TicketsNow, where "speculation" occurs, even when face-value Springsteen tickets were still available via Ticketmaster.

Check out more on Springsteen's allegations.

This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...