Bruce Springsteen fans upset over $5,000 concert tickets

The glory days of seeing the boss without going into debt may soon be over.

Fans of Bruce Springsteen, who has built his music career on his working-class image, have been appalled by the sky-high ticket prices for his forthcoming tour with the E Street Band – the first in six years.

The tour begins Thursday in Buffalo, and seats go for up to $5,000 each.

The four-digit ticket prices are the result of Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” system, in which an algorithm fluctuates prices in real time based on supply and demand.

The Boss manager Jon Landau defended the astronomical prices, noting that the average ticket price was in the mid-$200 range and calling it a “fair price,” news agency HellGateNYC.com reported.

“It felt like a dope,” Connecticut resident Donna Gray told the outlet because she couldn’t afford tickets to see her beloved working-class hero.

The longtime fan opened up about her special connection to the boss and how she’s looked to him as a mentor of sorts over the years.

“[He’s] someone whose music catalog I use as a blueprint for my emotions, my life situations, celebrations and sorrows.”

“I even linked a song to my mother’s death,” she said.

Others are equally upset, wondering what Springsteen stands for at this point.

“It’s just so out of character for what he was. He should be that guy who writes about Youngstown and writes about the working class guy and gives money to food banks,” Kevin Farrell, a native of Sea Grift, New Jersey, told HellGateNYC, calling the price gouging deaf.

“Now with these ticket prices he seems either unaware or doesn’t care that people are being left behind – for me and other people like me – we feel cheated.”

Farrell told the news outlet that he spent at most $250 to see the Freehold, NJ music icon — a price that doesn’t now let him into arenas like Madison Square Garden or Barclays Center, although, as HellGateNYC notes, he he may get non-ideal seating at MetLife Stadium when Springsteen rolls through in September.

Farrell can afford to shell out the extra money to see Springsteen, but it’s more a matter of principle, he said.

“I was so disgusted with the whole process that I said, ‘I’m not buying a ticket. That’s just wrong,'” he said.

The exploding Springsteen tickets are a sign of the times. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé fans have also faced sticker shock while attempting to purchase concert tickets.

Springsteen seems to agree with everything.

The singer told Rolling Stone last year: “I tell my boys, ‘Get out there and see what everyone else is doing. Let’s ask for a little less.’ … In the last 49 years, or however long we’ve been playing, we’ve been pretty much under market value. I enjoyed that. It was great for the fans. This time I said to them, ‘Hey, we’re 73 years old. The boys are here. I want to do what everyone else is doing, my colleagues.’ So this is what happened. They did.”

Still, it seems like even Springsteen’s deepest fans wouldn’t be willing to shell out $5,000 to see him. Late last month, Asbury Park Press reported that the band’s $5,000 tickets to the band’s North American arena tour went unsold.

Another super fan, Julie Chazanoff of Mount Kisco, told HellGateNYC that when she clicked “Checkout,” the price of two tickets she was planning to buy for February in Tampa, Florida tripled.

“These tickets are crazy. I keep a few in my basket and they’re absolutely a mortgage payment,” Chazanoff told the outlet.

“I almost cried at that point.”