Tomorrow, less than 24 hours from now, I am going to be vying with the rest of Canada for tickets to Madonna’s only Canadian date.
Since her only UK date sold out in 10 minutes, it will no doubt be cutthroat. Here is my plan of action:
Obviously, log on to ticketmaster.ca before 10AM, pull up the order screen and get as far as the site will let me (you can only get so far until 10 AM), then finalize the transaction at 10.
Have my one and only, Upside_Down_Amber, working the phones at the same time.
Other than that, I got nothin’.
My advantages: I am planning on buying the most expensive ticket, and this article implies that in the UK sellout, the pricey ones were the last to go. I have a fast 'net connection. I am getting The Missus to call the ticketmaster located in the little town in Ontario where I was born, not the one in Toronto, which I know will be flooded.
Is there anything more I can do? My parents are here to visit for the weekend so I can’t waste any “visiting time” hanging around the box office in person. Also, many box offices have a “no camping” policy anyway.
You’ve pretty much got it other than having more people checking for you.
If you strike out you can ALWAYS get tickets from a broker for the right price. Look in the daily classifieds of your local paper (provided it’s big enough).
Good luck to ya. Having just tried to do something equivalent for opening day tickets at our brand new ballpark here in San Diego, I did everything possible and still got shut down. Tickets sold out in 10 minutes.
About the only other advice I have for you is to use both your land line phone and cell phone(s) to call at the same time you are logging on. In my experience, the website will be useless because everyone will be hitting the site at the same time and you will just get the old ‘this page cannot be displayed’ error. That’s what happened to us.
I know you had indicated you couldn’t “camp out” at the box office because of family in town, but there might be another faster option that would involve only a minor disappearance on your part. Here in California, some of the Robinsons-May department stores have Ticketmaster branches, though few people know this. It’s usually hidden back by the gift wrap department. Their stores open no later than 10am here and some open at 9:00am. If you have these stores in Canada, you might want to call around and find one, or try other major department stores to see if any of them have a branch. In my experience, their ticketmasters are always empty.
That’s a great idea, but I can’t, since I live in Quebec, and ticketmaster doesn’t have any outlets here - it’s a company called “Admission” instead, and they aren’t offering Madonna tickets. You should never have told me your story, though, I’m scared now - maybe she’ll add another date, like she did in the UK!
If you can get another person to help you out, you can send them to the ticketmaster location for the random wristband draw, get there 45 minutes early. Give 'em a cell phone and see how well you do in the draw. Have one person wait in line, one person working the phones and one person working the website.
If you do crap out in the draw, get that person to come work the phones with you. That’s all my advice. Good Luck.
I saw the Rolling Stones at your old baseball stadium back in 1981. I went to the Ticketron outlet at the Bill Gamble men’s store in Fashion Valley on the morning tickets went on sale, and there was no one else in the shop. Thinking “They couldn’t have sold out already,” I went up to the counter and asked, “Do you have Rolling Stones tickets?” “Sure do.” “Oh, okay, two please!” And that was that. That evening I saw on the news the people who stood in line for hours for tickets at the other mall!
one possibility–just speculating–might be to call the phone number for ticketmaster offices as far away from you as possible. maybe people in, say, vancouver or a small town somewhere would be less likely to be calling their local office for a show in toronto, meaning of course that you’d have a better chance of getting through.
If your really keen, mozilla + plugins can let you load several versions of the same page and reload them all simultaneously. Have about 10 different connections to the ticket website and reload them continuously. As long as your not saturating your connection (which is pretty hard to do with broadband), you have a much better chance of hitting a lucky connection.
don’t ask, the presale was only for members of her fan club, which costs $35 US and gets you pretty much nothing other than eligibility for lame contests and four crappy fanzines per year. There is no way I would have had time to sign up even if I cared about the presale.
As for the $700 tickets, they are guaranteed to be in the first twenty rows and you also get a VIP pass and access to the VIP area. If I’d had a VIP pass when I went to Madonna’s last tour in Philadelphia, I could have hung out with Britney Spears. As a lowly plebe, I had to settle for watching her walk through the VIP entrance.
Slight highjack, but am I the only one who thinks the “random wristband” thing is a bunch if crap? I have some great memories hanging out in front of Tower Records all night long wiating for tickets to go on sale. Good conversation with a wide range of people with similar interests (in music anyway): 2 AM pizza delivery: all-night music trivia contests; and the satisfaction of knowing you deserved those third row tickets, dammit!
kung fu lola, I’m not suggesting that you don’t deserve your tickets. I’m just getting all sentimental about the “good old days”.
Another tip (although you already have your tickets, but it might help in the future) is to wait until the day of the show and then check. You’d be surprised how many good seats get sent back into the pool within 48 hours of the show. I know a girl at work who is obsessed with boy bands (and the like) and she almost always gets in the first five rows with this tactic.
