Widespread Panic Ticket Sales

Today is the big day for New Year's Eve 2010 Widespread Panic ticket sales.  After nearly 25 years of buying concert tickets, I have felt a certain sense of mastery of the process.  Yet, at the same time, despite decades of technological improvements, the same combination of anticipation and anxiety seems to be unavoidable.

Back in the 90s, I was living in Chicago, and the biggest problem with buying concert tickets was that you had two options - call in by phone, or to wait in a long line at an outlet.  I was one of the early adopters of the strategy where you call in 20 minutes before the official on-sale time, and talk an agent's ear off about sports events that you have no intention of attending.  Then, at 5 seconds before the hour, you say "Oh, I think so-and-so is playing on this date", and they would say, "You're lucky, they just went on sale!"

Yeah, lucky.

It didn't take long before supervisors at Ticketron (before the days of monopoly) and Ticketmaster figured out this strategy, and disallowed their phone reps from being strung along like this.  I recall quite a few calls in subsequent years where the agent would reply to my request for White Sox tickets and say "If you are waiting for Pink Floyd, I am not going to process your order!"

So, in reaction, some of us wise guys escalated our game, and widened our strategy geographically.  If they weren't going to let us call in to the Chicago numbers and play the string-along game, then we would perhaps call St. Louis Ticketmaster, where the supervisors were unaware of the events going on up in Chicago.   This worked like a charm.

In 1994, we used this strategy to gain access to an extremely exclusive show with Eric Clapton at Buddy Guy's Legends.  Only 250 tickets were made available to the public. It was actually my roommate who made the call to St. Louis, chatted with them about Cardinal's tickets for 30 minutes, and then swooped in to get the maximum allotment of 2 tickets.  I was sitting there dying because it worked, but then he pulled a new move - he asked if he could pass the phone to me so I could buy two as well.  The girl said "Sure.  Why not?"

Oh, for bygone days.  That show is one of my Top 3 Lifetime shows.  Not only was Clapton putting on a show that was beyond words, but it showcased his blues side in a venue that was perfectly fitting for the music - Buddy Guy's tiny bar in downtown Chicago.  I bootlegged a single track Lanier micro-cassette dictation recorder into the show (I had worked for the company selling these a few years before), by putting it into my sock on the front of my shin.  And, on the other leg, a throwaway camera.  Got by security who patted both legs, but forgot to check the front side of my leg.  Felt like a secret agent.

The recording was crappy mono, with interludes of my personal woos.  But, I still have it stored somewhere, more to prove the point than to actually listen. Could be a bit of packratism too. And, the photos had to be taken without a flash to avoid the camera being taken, and zero shots turned out.  Except for the one Deb took of me jumping in the air in front of the venue to have a picture of the marquee.

But, it was truly a show of a lifetime, and at the end of the show we got a bonus.  We were standing behind a small section of VIP seats that were set up in front of the stage.  The guy in front of us stood up at the end of the show, turned around, and it was none other than Pete Townsend.

I am a famous-guy freeze-up geek, so I probably only uttered an unintelligible mix between a grunt and a greeting, that I am sure he didn't notice.  You can plan for years what to say to your heroes, but it's rare when you get a chance to deliver your message that it actually results in you speaking it.  My experience, at least.

By the mid-to-late 90s, the phones became impossible, so you had to have on-the-ground strategies.  It was simple in one way - just find an outlet no one else would think of.  In Chicago, it was the Carson, Pirie Scott & Company location at the Merchandise Mart.  The only people that would ever show up were the scalpers, who hired homeless people to stand in line.  Many a Saturday I'd spend my 6-10am time with a few dozen homeless people, waiting to score tickets to amazing shows from bands like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Grateful Dead.

When I moved out to Colorado, we eventually had to settle on a strategy of finding the most remote locations possible.  I eventually settled on this tiny record store in Eastern Colorado owned by a guy named John who was super cool.  Instead of making each person in line announce their needs as they got the the counter, he got all their orders ahead of time while they were in line, at when the tickets went on sale, he'd pull them all as fast as he could.  Then, we'd settle up afterwards.

It was awesome, show after show, to have face value tickets in hand, while those on the Internet and phones who didn't had to go to scalpers to pay the premium.  OK, maybe not awesome, but it was better than the alternative.

Of course, this led to becoming a personal ticketmaster.  One year, for a Panic Red Rocks show, I believe I had purchased, with the help of 4 friends, about 150 tickets worth over $8000.  Keeping my efforts pure, I organized the whole thing via a few spreadsheets, and managed to deliver them to real fans for no profit.  It felt good at the time, but I think my days of going that far are behind me.

But, now we are in the 21st Century, and you'd think buying a concert ticket would be something that would have been mastered by now.  Heck, they chose the name TicketMASTER, so why not.  But, their iron grip has resulted in a revolt in the marketplace where wannabes somehow convince Artists, Promoters, and Venues that their interests are better served with their little ticket site.

And, on principle I agree.  Yeah, let's support the little guy.

But, as a fan who just wants to quickly and easily buy a concert ticket, I am amazed at the incredibly stupid sites that are somehow the random factor that not only thwarts my attempts to get GOOD tickets, but to get ANY tickets at all.

This week is a perfect example.  Widespread Panic is returning to the Pepsi Center for New Year's Eve this year, and they have chosen eTix and Ticket Horse as the companies to offer them to fans.  There were two presales during the week before the Saturday main offering, and while we know plenty who were able to make purchases, they certainly didn't make them easy.

On Tuesday, eTix site was barely capable of selling less than 1000 tickets to many times more fans.  There was no way to go the site prior to the load your billing information and have an account ready when the tickets went on sale.  The site crashed from the volume of fans, which was considerably less than it would have been because the band's announcement was only on Monday, and few heard or noticed the presale.

On Friday, another presale at Ticket Horse went even worse.  The site did not even have a link to offer the tickets until 7-8 minutes after the official start time.  You just kept reloading the page with a frustrating generic message about tickets being on sale at 10am.

It was relatively easy to put tickets into your cart, but then you had minimal time to try to guess what freaking letters that anti-robot system was trying to get you to type.  If you failed, it dropped your order.

Several people, including myself, had made it past that point, and were in the process of actually trying to complete the transaction when it would give you a message that you had another shopping cart open in another browser.  No, we didn't.  Your crazy system was somehow thinking that because we hit "refresh", it gave us a new cookie (or something), without killing the old one.  Their stupid system caused many buyers to have their shopping carts emptied over web design coding that simply forgot what humans in a rush to get tickets to their favorite band would do - refresh, open and close browser tabs, or even open and close browsers.  This is web design 101, in my humble opinion.

But, worse than that, we know of one person who ordered floor tickets, and was surprised to get a confirmation with seats in a 100 section.  That's simply unacceptable.  It's nearly bait and switch.

Usually, 1000 tickets for this band should sell out in 3.2 seconds.  Hate to give Ticketmaster any favorable review, but at least their site doesn't crash trying to sell this many tickets.

On Friday, however, we know of many people that were still able to buy tickets after 40 minutes.  The reason was all of the buyers were losing their orders to crazy messages, timeouts, and browser crashes - over and over again.

Plus, they had this ill-conceived design that required someone who wanted to specify floor tickets.  You had a pull down menu to choose between floor and seats.  Then, another pull down that would have let you pick between sections 102 - 148.  When you chose floor in the one pull down, the message in the other said "best available".  Logic would tell you no action was necessary on the second pull down.  But, through experience, we learned that you had to go to the second pull down to choose floor again.

We may be slow learners, but that is some seriously flawed logic on the part of the designer.  Probably someone who has never bought a concert ticket before in his/her life.

The other thing that was a geeky flaw was their handling of GA tickets.  While GA means General Admission, a database doesn't see those tickets that way.  All get assigned a sequential number.  As each buyer pulls tickets, they get a set of numbers in the sequence.  For instance, if you purchase 4 tickets, you might get GA#s 187, 188, 189, and 190.

However, if you attempt to get 4, and you are late in the game, it is possible it will tell you none are available.  Yet, there may be HUNDREDS still available.  The problem is, these ticket numbers in the database are now scattered - usually because of all these dropped carts and browser crashes.  So, while there are no sets of 4 numbers in sequence, there are plenty of singles and pairs that are earlier in the overall sequence - like 62 & 63, or 121 & 122.  If you don't request two vs. four, you think you missed out, when all you have to do is to make two purchases (and double your "convenience fees").

It's a racket, I tell ya.

So, a couple hours before the sale for all the rest of the tickets, I am sitting here thinking that surely there must be a better way.  While places like Ticket Horse are to be commended for trying to compete with the monopoly that is Ticketmaster, it would be nice of them to at the very least have adaquate design and hardware to complete the job.  Otherwise, it's just going to lead to concertgoers saying that despite being ripped off by Ticketmaster, at least the life-shortening anxiety their crappy sites put fans through isn't something they have to experience.

Good luck to everyone trying to get their seats today!