You know, with all these extra fees that people pay towards Ticketmaster, you’d think they would put SOME of their budget back into their website.
Here’s the story. Pearl Jam is one of my favorite bands, and they do by far the best live show I’ve ever seen. This is probably what puts tickets to their show in such high demand in the first place. One of the things that made this band famous was suing Ticketmaster back in the 90s for having extremely crazy service fees. Ticketmaster won that suit, never changed their ways, and for the next 4 years PJ attempted to do Ticketmaster-free touring, something that didn’t work out so well for them, since more and more venues are in bed with Ticketmaster. So now they’re back to playing places like Madison Square Garden which ONLY sell through Ticketmaster.
Pearl Jam has a policy that members of their fan club get first stab at the best seats. It was the same case with the two upcoming NY @ MSG shows, however there were only 1000 pairs (2000 tickets released), so my fan club # was not even close enough to get in on that presale. The band realizes what a problem this is, and strikes a deal with Ticketmaster to have a second presale, with a password mailed out to the fan club members. I get in on this presale RIGHT at the starting minute, and ALREADY it is sold out both nights! Strike two. So 2 days later, the regular admission starts at 10am. I log in right at 10 am (and have two of my friends be my backup) and ticketmaster.com won’t even load! We keep trying for 15 minutes and finally it loads, and there aren’t any tickets left. FUCK! Just what the hell is going on here - you got someone who really wants to see this show and takes time out of his and his friends work schedules to be there right when they go on sale (twice, mind you), and your website can’t even deliver? Yet somehow everybody ELSE manages to sell out the show in 15 minutes?
Of course, stubhub.com has tickets listed for that show, before the presale even starts. They have TONS to go around, if I want to pay at least twice what the face value + ticketmaster anal rape fees are. Seeing how I just gave the IRS half of what was left in my bank account, that just isn’t happening. I would get into a rant about what a ripoff the hidden fees on tickets are, but I’m sure it’s been done to death. Here’s a suggestion - charge us another $3 and get a website THAT CAN FUCKING HANDLE TRAFFIC WHEN THE BIGGEST SHOW OF THE YEAR GOES ON SALE!!!
It’s a real shame that one of my favorite bands is doing a show within walking distance of my home, and I can’t even see it without giving up an entire week’s paycheck.
The lack of availability of tickets is not Ticketmaster’s fault. It’s the fault of whoever prices the tickets doing so at well below the natural market value.
Yes, they really do sell out that fast. Yes, people really are willing to pay that much for Pearl Jam tickets, not just because they want to see Pearl Jam (who are world-class rock stars with huge fanbases), but because they can go on Stubhub and make a profit. Ticketmaster’s website probably had trouble loading because tens of thousands of people logged on at that instant to try to purchase tickets.
There are really easy ways to avoid the problem of shows selling out immediately, but they all involve paying more for tickets, so most people aren’t in favor of them. The band could, of course, still offer some tickets to loyal members for less than market value, but those would always be limited, and you’d have to get lucky to get them.
I guess you missed what I was pitting here. TICKETMASTER, for having a website that won’t even LOAD at the time the ticket sale is supposed to start, not even giving me an OPPORTUNITY to buy tickets!!! And it wasn’t just my computer or ISP, cuz I had two other people doing the same thing, with their own computers and separate ISPs, and ticketmaster.com wouldn’t load from them either.
If I could offer a solution to this, it’s one of two things:
get a damn website which can HANDLE this amount of traffic. We’re throwing all this money at you for doing NOTHING, so you can afford it.
release the tickets in time intervals, so that not everybody is scrambling to get them at once. If they release 1000 tickets an hour (or at random times) it gives people a better shot at getting them.
Do you understand how web servers work? This is what happens when way too many people try to log on at once. Ticketmaster’s web site probably loaded for thousands of people that morning, maybe more. Certainly it worked well enough for their purposes. That’s how all those people got tickets.
As to your points:
Their website is clearly sufficient for their purposes. They sold every single ticket in 15 minutes. Now, it sucks for the people who didn’t get one, but what does Ticketmaster have to gain from investing further? The only difference is that they would have a nice snappy webpage that says “Sorry, sold out” displayed much faster. You still wouldn’t get tickets, because there aren’t enough to satisfy demand at the given the price point. You seem to think that, if only they’d had more server capacity, there would have been more tickets to buy. That’s not how it works.
Yeah, this would be awesome. Instead of people swamping their servers for 15 minutes every time a way-underpriced show is opened for sale, you’d have people doing it constantly. And everyone who wants to buy a ticket to something else, that’s not underpriced, gets a bad experience, too. Oh, and their server costs go way up, because they have to deal with people constantly refreshing.
By all means, take these suggestions to Ticketmaster. I’m sure they enjoy a good laugh.
Why would someone support a band that shows such contempt for its fanbase by playing shows of that size? I’ve never understood the mentality. Not only are you getting absolutely nothing out of seeing the band in such a huge arena, but the band is conspiring with an insulting ticket system that gives a giant middle finger to its fanbase and instead releases presale tickets to scalpers and to connected business figures that have zero interest in the band. Why would you relish paying a lot of money to see a band that operates this way?
No, that isn’t what I think. I think that if I was able to get the server to load during either the presale or general sale, I would have had tickets. Why is it that thousands of other people were able to get through and buy tickets (and not just scalpers, other actual fans posted on Pearl Jam’s official forum that they were able to get tickets. Crappy tickets, but still enough to get them into the building) but all three attempts by people I know failed, when we all hit reload right at 10am?
So just what is the PROPER way to buy tickets? I personally have not used ticketmaster even ONCE since moving to NYC 5 years ago, as it’s both easier and cheaper to buy them at the box office - you’d think that a venue with the slogan “the world’s most famous arena” would actually have their own box office too, but they don’t. Does ticketmaster give preference to people who buy there more often? There’s no possible way that I had two backup people looking up tickets to see which of us had the best seats, so I don’t believe we were locked out for that. Last time PJ was at MSG in 2003, many more tickets were released to the fan club pre-sale, so it wasn’t an issue that time. And Kalibakthegreat, you are wrong about that. When I saw them at the same arena in 2003, it was DEFINITELY the best concert I’ve ever been to, and I’m sure once I’m actually in the door, this one will at least be on the same level. And they also sucked up a $40,000 curfew fee at that show and played an extra 40 minutes with the houselights turned on because nobody (the band or fans) wanted to go home yet…which I think shows exactly how much the band cares about their fans.
Here is a method that has worked for me in the past: in addition to logging into the web site on several computers at the same time, get on the phone (or two phones) and call a local Ticketmaster phone number in a totally different city that has nothing big going on sale that day. So you’re more likely to get through on the phone without a busy signal to a Tickemaster in another city.
I did this a few years back and it worked… not sure if it would still work, but worth a try.
I don’t understand why iamthewalrus(:3= is being so snarky. If a website is not accessible due to load, it is undersized for the traffic in question. For a random website being slashdotted, this is understandable. For a major website with a frustratingly incomprehensible monopoly on tickets and completely foreseeable spikes in traffic loads, it’s not.
I most certainly do, and while these sorts of ticketing apps are clearly one of the more challenging bits of web app design, it’s neither a particularly new problem, nor beyond solving (even without massive infrastructure investment). Glastonbury festival in the UK manages to sell out a quarter of a million tickets in a couple of hours, and (these days) does so without having its site silently crash. This is Ticketbastard’s business. They do it constantly. To be incapable of running a half-decent ticketing system in 2008 is just shit, particularly when you’re charging people in the region of 50% in “convenience fees” and other such crap. Simply seeing a blank page is immensely frustrating.
Obviously, no ticketing system is going to ensure that everyone who wants a ticket for an oversubscribed event will get one. However, having your site simply fall over is not what is smug bastards call a “graceful failure mode”. The Glastonbury site, for example, has a very lightweight initial page which can be served at little cost by a separate server; going here, users get placed in a queue according to the order in which they logged on. Only when they reach the “front” of the queue are they presented with a unique link to the actual ticket-buying bit, and they then have a ten-minute window in which to complete their purchase. So the heavy bits of the ticketing app don’t get hammered, people who can’t yet get through are presented with some information telling them how close to getting through they are, and everyone’s as happy as possible.
(Except that they’re then going to realise they’ve spent hundreds of quid on a weekend up to their armpits in mud, thieves and felafel, of course.)
But upgrading the web server is going to cost money, and it’s not clear how a better web server would bring in more money for Ticketmaster. Their customers can’t go to a competitor to buy tickets.
Well … yeah. Sounds like a perfectly decent rant to me. Or is everyone supposed to be happy because it’s a monopoly and that makes everything okay? Hurrah for 50% mark-ups and shit service! Yay capitalism! Or something.
If there’s something that I must have tickets for I know a few places that have Ticketbastard locations inside of them that nobody ever seems to go to, ever, so I just show up there early and chat up the people working the counter. Lots of them are dumb as hammers so it’s good for them to start looking up the event early anyway.
Some of us question whether or not the “shit service” actually prevented the OP from getting tickets. If there are 15,000 tickets out there, and 15,000 people log on at 10am, each looking for 4 tickets, it doesn’t matter how awesome the server is, chances are, you’re not getting jack. They sold out all the tickets in 15 minutes, which means there were boatloads of people logging in just for that concert, and they had enough capacity to sell out almost immediately.
The OP wants ticketmaster to spend tons of money so that in these situations, the tickets sell out in 10 minutes instead of 15, and he still won’t get any.
But it wouldn’t take tons of money, just a bit of thought and some careful design. It’s really not rocket science, and when you’re talking about a company that’s been doing something for as many years as Ticketbastard have, it’s really quite astounding that they don’t even do it competently. If I were part of their technical staff I’d be frankly embarrassed that their main method of coping with spikes of traffic (something they must have thousands of times a year) is to simply have the server choke.
I agree that nothing would improve the OP’s chances of actually getting a ticket, but being presented with a blank, timing-out page is a lot more frustrating that being shown some indicator of progress (or lack thereof). Actually, just to immediately contradict myself, it’s also quite plausible that a decent automated queuing system would cut out a lot of the scalpers using bots to buy tickets and clogging up the servers, which would indeed increase the OP’s chances.
Also, I hear they gave P!nk her record contract. And invented Barney the dinosaur. And invaded Poland.
Ticketmaster has always had this issue, just that in the pre-internet days it was getting ringback instead of getting a page to load. You’d dial their unholy number and instead of a ring, you’d get an error message from the switch. Then we learned to do what nyctea and Cluricaun suggested.
But from Ticketmaster’s point of view, why would they add more capacity (phone or web) for the 15 minutes it takes to sell out a big event? It would cost them a lot more money and provide their customers with nothing extra.
In case you missed it, the OP was clear that somebody was able to buy all the tickets it wanted - the scalping service StubHub. It’s enough to make a sceptic wonder about collusion. TicketMaster’s server crashs while the general public is trying to buy tickets. But StubHub is able to get through and buy up all the tickets. Now the general public has to buy these same tickets from StubHub at three times their listed price. The general public ticket buyers are obviously out of luck. The band doesn’t make any money. StubHub makes a fortune off a situation that they were somehow perfectly placed to take advantage of. It’s enough to make a person wonder if TicketMaster got a nice payoff from StubHub for making sure the server crash happened on schedule.
I don’t know if you could call them the “good old days”, but there was a time when us geezers spent the night in line outside the box office. One time we went directly from a Yes concert to get in line for Springsteen tix. Unfortunately, that was also the time that the employees skimmed off most of the tickets before the doors even opened. I “had to” call in sick on a scheduled Saturday one time in order to get in line for Who tickets.
When I worked for Pac Bell, we’d go into the Switching Control Center on Sunday mornings and use the FEX lines to give us a better chance to get into the Ticketmaster number. (Network Management throttled calls coming in from outlying central offices during high-volume calling events)
Pearl Jam stopped being revelent about 10 years ago anyway. You ain’t missin’ nothin’!
If Pearl Jam really gave a shit about thier fans, they would find someplace to play that would let them sell tickets real cheap to their fans themselves.
Oh, that right. Jeff needs new crayons. Won’t happen.