Live Nation’s Ticketing Servers Have Phish Fans Bouncing Around The Room (In A Bad Way)

noah | January 30, 2009 3:00 am

Tickets for select shows on Phish’s summer reunion tour went on sale this afternoon, and the onsales represented the first big test of sorts for the online ticketing system run by concert-promotion behemoth Live Nation. the comments sections of Hidden Trck and, surprisingly, Brooklyn Vegan to register their displeasure.

The complaints were legion on both sites: “Live Nation’s site is just bombing. Is this their first first rush for tickets?”; “i jsut got a camden lawn – entered my credit card info… hit button – dumped me back into the queue!!!! what the frig?”; “Live Nation should be embarrassed. Who would have thought someone could suck worse than ticketmaster???” One person even went so far to post “TICKETMASTER RULES!!!” but presumably that was just some next-level Internet comment satire.

Those people who aren’t so into Phish were also, for some reason, clicking through to make their proclamations that Phish was “bullshit for six-year-olds” heard loud and clear (to be fair, this phenomenon was pretty much restricted to the BV comments section), but how can you be so cruel in the face of stories like this?

I was online at 9:58 eastern, by 10:02 the homepage wouldnt even load. I had a set of orchestra seats for jones beach, on my screen, but then got the error message server timed out when i tried to buy. by the time i got back in there was nothing. By 10:20 all shows in my area were sold out. Im sick of Livenation, Im sick of the whole ‘concert experience’. I wonder why they monopolize the ticket sales then do not have enough server horsepower to handle the influx of orders. I didnt want to drink $10 beers and $15 hotdogs anyway. 30 seconds after they sold out, I checked stubhub and theres seats for all the shows from $200-$2000. I refuse to pay scalpers. I’ll be missing phish for the first time in my life. Ive been a Phan since 96.

Actually, the prices on the NYC-area shows are now topping out at $2500, and will probably only go up from there. Public service announcement to any Phish fans reading this who want to get tickets to one of tomorrow morning’s onsales (c’mon, I know that some of you are out there): You should probably try and find your local Blockbuster between now and then.

Open Thread: Phish Summer Tour Onsale [Hidden Track] Phish too big for LiveNation.com to handle [BV] [Thanks to Patrick Mulrenin for the headline assistance!]

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