If you didn’t get tickets through the Phish lottery, or just forgot about the lottery, and tried to get tickets for the Summer Tour yesterday or today, you were probably greeted with error messages, waiting rooms, and pages not loading. It seems as though Live Nation, who recently broke free of Ticketmaster, couldn’t handle the load of traffic coming from people looking to score tickets to this summer’s hottest tour.
The problems started yesterday, just as tickets were put on sale at 10:00 am EST. People were immediately greeted with “500 Internal Server Error” or other fun error messages. Many were placed in a “waiting room” as seen in the video below. Finally, after about 2 hours of continuous trying, people started to trickle in and get their tickets. It was an epic failure on the part of Live Nation that one would have expected to be fixed by this morning, when more shows went on sale. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. While today’s problems didn’t last quite as long as yesterday’s, people were still greeted with error messages, occasional server errors, and the dreaded waiting room. After about 30-45 minutes of trying, people were able to get through and the show sold out very shortly after.
What would have quick and easy, as the shows should have sold out within 15 minutes of the on-sale time, turned into a long drawn out process. Ticket sales giant, Ticketmaster, for all their faults, occasionally had site time-out problems back in the mid-late 90s, but got those taken care of quickly and you rarely got error messages from them. It was a painless process, unless, of course, you didn’t get through quickly enough.
Phish needs to bring back their Tickets by Mail system. You have to mail in your request postmarked within certain dates. You were thrown into a lottery and almost guaranteed tickets. The reason for this is because it was a lot of work for scalpers who just did it the old fashioned way of going through Ticketmaster either online, by phone, or in person at the venue or at a Ticketmaster location.
I actually once went to the venue, the Hartford Civic Center, to get tickets (had to wake up at 7:00 am on a weekend when I was in college to do it). It was a strange process. You got there and sat in a line and then were given a bracelet with a number. We all then went and sat in the stands and our numbers were randomly called. I found it odd that they did it that way. I always assumed they rewarded the people who got there first. While there were a lot of fans there, there were also a lot of scalpers (who were easily spotted standing in line rapping or bringing their kids so they could all by the maximum allowed quantity). The one concert I went to that actually did it in order of arrival was for Paul McCartney. We went to Filene’s (they don’t exist anymore), which was a Ticketmaster outlet. There were only about 8 of us in line and one guy was there way before everyone else. We all agreed that we’d go in order rather than pick random numbers, which is the Ticketmaster policy. While we were in line at the counter, some late arrivals were pissed that we did it that way, but, in my opinion, that’s the fair way to do it. Why should someone who shows up 5 minutes after they go on sale get tickets before someone who had been waiting for 4 hours?
I will continue to try for tickets through the lottery before any other means. If Phish ever comes back to Providence and plays the Dunk, I’ll be in line at the box office the morning they go on sale, bright and early. Live Nation needs to learn from this and fix the problems. People should not be greeted with a waiting room. They should submit their requests and then be put in line.
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