before she gets to saying goodbye...
Tickets are getting harder to get hold of, aren't they?
Glastonbury last year was a nightmare. Who would have thought that if you only had a handful of operators on the phones, and a woefully underpowered website, that things would all collapse when thousands and thousands of people all try to buy tickets in the first few hours? The good news is that they are using basically the same system again this year.... the even better news is that I will be trying to get tickets whilst I am in France.
Hmm.
We all know about the shambles that was the U2 presale, don't we?
Does it have to be this way?
In a word. No.
I've always liked Coldplay.
Call it bedwetters' music if you must, but I think they are brilliant. "Parachutes" is gorgeous... there's not a bad song on it, and "A Rush Of Blood To The Head" is just majestic; a quantum leap forwards. I was lucky enough to be at Glastonbury in 2002 when they debuted this material in their headline slot on the Friday night. It seems laughable now, but people had genuinely been worried that they weren't a big enough band, that they wouldn't be up to it. They came on, played "Politik" and the rest is history.
I think I first signed up to their website shortly after that - they were doing day-by-day previews of the new album (which I seem to remember didn't come out until October - some 4 months after the festival). A new track was available to listen to every day. I remember the first time I heard "The Scientist". Ahhh.
It's all been pretty quiet since then (apart from them breaking America, becoming one of the biggest selling acts in the world, the singer marrying an Oscar-winning actress and having his first child named after a piece of fruit....). They are so big now that EMI had to announce a profit warning when it was revealed that the Coldplay album wouldn't be released until after the end of their financial year.
They send me newsletters occasionally - generally telling me how things are going, what the drummer has been up to, and how I can help make trade fair (they are very visible supporters of Oxfam - Chris Martin wore a"make trade fair" t-shirt every day for about 2 years. I hope he had more than one....)
They seem nice.
They sent me an email this week telling me that they were about to announce their UK tour, and that they were going to give me, the humble subscriber to coldplay.com, the chance to buy tickets ahead of the crush of the public sale. All I had to do was go to the site, enter my email address and tell them which show I wanted to go to, and how many tickets I wanted (up to 4). The idea was that they then try to allocate the tickets on a first-come, first-served basis, and email me back if I had been lucky. In other words, my waiting to find out if I had got tickets would take place offline. If I was lucky, I would then have 24 hours to make my purchase, or the tickets would be released.
Hm. I've been here before. Only a few weeks before Johnny Buckland will be sending me an email apologising for the shambles of their tickets sales, surely? Ah - what the hell, worth a shot? (and thanks to Lord Bargain here - I was going to let this one go past until he talked me into it, and offered to drive up to Bolton and back for the gig on a Monday night)
I made my request at about 2pm today. They emailed me back about 3pm with a link. I followed the link and bought the tickets. £35 each (which Lord Bargain even paid for, bless him)
Job done. Hassle free. They'd even thought far enough ahead to check how long you had been a member at the website before letting you have tickets (i.e. trying to stop people who had only registered in the last week nabbing all the tickets)
Why can't they all be like this?
More importantly, why do I spend so much of my life trying to buy tickets? (thirteen senses on saturday - very exciting)
----
Depressingly, and predictably I've just been over to Ebay. Apparently the tempatation to make a quick profit has been too much for some scumbags to resist. The deadlines for all the auctions are of course set to end just before the general sale begins on Saturday morning.
I can't think of a good reason for people to do this except money. They buy more tickets than they need for themselves, or buy tickets to concerts they will never go to, and seek to rip-off the fans. Greed. Naked greed.
Wankers.
Glastonbury last year was a nightmare. Who would have thought that if you only had a handful of operators on the phones, and a woefully underpowered website, that things would all collapse when thousands and thousands of people all try to buy tickets in the first few hours? The good news is that they are using basically the same system again this year.... the even better news is that I will be trying to get tickets whilst I am in France.
Hmm.
We all know about the shambles that was the U2 presale, don't we?
Does it have to be this way?
In a word. No.
I've always liked Coldplay.
Call it bedwetters' music if you must, but I think they are brilliant. "Parachutes" is gorgeous... there's not a bad song on it, and "A Rush Of Blood To The Head" is just majestic; a quantum leap forwards. I was lucky enough to be at Glastonbury in 2002 when they debuted this material in their headline slot on the Friday night. It seems laughable now, but people had genuinely been worried that they weren't a big enough band, that they wouldn't be up to it. They came on, played "Politik" and the rest is history.
I think I first signed up to their website shortly after that - they were doing day-by-day previews of the new album (which I seem to remember didn't come out until October - some 4 months after the festival). A new track was available to listen to every day. I remember the first time I heard "The Scientist". Ahhh.
It's all been pretty quiet since then (apart from them breaking America, becoming one of the biggest selling acts in the world, the singer marrying an Oscar-winning actress and having his first child named after a piece of fruit....). They are so big now that EMI had to announce a profit warning when it was revealed that the Coldplay album wouldn't be released until after the end of their financial year.
They send me newsletters occasionally - generally telling me how things are going, what the drummer has been up to, and how I can help make trade fair (they are very visible supporters of Oxfam - Chris Martin wore a"make trade fair" t-shirt every day for about 2 years. I hope he had more than one....)
They seem nice.
They sent me an email this week telling me that they were about to announce their UK tour, and that they were going to give me, the humble subscriber to coldplay.com, the chance to buy tickets ahead of the crush of the public sale. All I had to do was go to the site, enter my email address and tell them which show I wanted to go to, and how many tickets I wanted (up to 4). The idea was that they then try to allocate the tickets on a first-come, first-served basis, and email me back if I had been lucky. In other words, my waiting to find out if I had got tickets would take place offline. If I was lucky, I would then have 24 hours to make my purchase, or the tickets would be released.
Hm. I've been here before. Only a few weeks before Johnny Buckland will be sending me an email apologising for the shambles of their tickets sales, surely? Ah - what the hell, worth a shot? (and thanks to Lord Bargain here - I was going to let this one go past until he talked me into it, and offered to drive up to Bolton and back for the gig on a Monday night)
I made my request at about 2pm today. They emailed me back about 3pm with a link. I followed the link and bought the tickets. £35 each (which Lord Bargain even paid for, bless him)
Job done. Hassle free. They'd even thought far enough ahead to check how long you had been a member at the website before letting you have tickets (i.e. trying to stop people who had only registered in the last week nabbing all the tickets)
Why can't they all be like this?
More importantly, why do I spend so much of my life trying to buy tickets? (thirteen senses on saturday - very exciting)
----
Depressingly, and predictably I've just been over to Ebay. Apparently the tempatation to make a quick profit has been too much for some scumbags to resist. The deadlines for all the auctions are of course set to end just before the general sale begins on Saturday morning.
I can't think of a good reason for people to do this except money. They buy more tickets than they need for themselves, or buy tickets to concerts they will never go to, and seek to rip-off the fans. Greed. Naked greed.
Wankers.
posted by swisslet @ 21:24
5 Comments:
At 1:56 am,
Mark said…
ridiculous isn't it? the way it used to be compared to the way it is now. u2 used to do it that way - it can still work. so why doesn't it? money. stuff 'em. soon people will just end up not even trying to get tickets. and then they'll be playing to half-full halls. just like they do in America. these days some bands expect you to pay to get a presale that doesnt guarantee tickets, crawl on broken glass, use a high interest debit card to pay for the front row tickets they're auctioning, be in on a workday to pick up the tickets, pay through the nose for a courier service you don't need, and a ticket fee, a convienience fee, and for the expense of getting them to run their servers, get the whole page time out, fail, retry, time out, fail, type in the numbers, and have two tickets charged twice to the same credit card.
CNN, BBC, Google. They're the top three busiest sites in the world. They NEVER fall over. Yet Ticketmaster (not even in the top ten) fall over all the time. They couldn't give a toss. They expect the customer to come back crawling on all fours just for the privilege of spending an obscene anmount of money. I'm seriously tempted with not bothering anymore.
At 10:25 am,
Damo said…
The system Coldplay came up with is good - for concerts, but not for festivals. But the tickets were still £32.50, I believe. I'm not bothering because they're at Glastonbury and I intend to be there...
...which brings me to why I hope they don't introduce this idea for festivals. Despite all the problems last year with Glastonbury tickets, everyone I know that REALLY wanted a ticket got one. An lottery system would mean you wouldn't know which of your friends were actually coming each year. I really hope Michael Eavis doesn't give in and do it one year, because the idea keeps coming back...
At 11:19 am,
swisslet said…
Ebay annoys me... not the concept itself, but the fact that it now effectively means that every concert I try to buy tickets for, I am competing with people who are out purely for profit. If a concert sells out in minutes, that's somehow fine if all the people lucky enough to get tickets are fans, but if they are touts, I'm not so happy. Ebay enables anyone to be a tout.
I have a colleague gets up at 3am in the morning to queue at the Nottingham Arena to get front row seats for things like Westlife and McFly, purely so he can sell them on. It's becoming quite a profitable sideline for him. On the one hand, people will only pay what they think they are worth, but on the other hand, he is taking tickets that some genuine fan would dearly love, and is profiteering on them. Worse still is that he seems to always be bumping into the same people in the rush to get to the front of the queue - i.e. he's not the only person doing it.
I agree with your comment about Glasto. Everyone I know who REALLY wanted to go got a ticket.... and at least glasto are taking some steps to try and stop reselling (photo id and stuff)
Fingers crossed.
At 6:02 pm,
Jenni said…
I heard on the radio this morning that people on Ebay are selling tickets to see television evangelist Joel Osteen in the Chicago area for three times the face value...while there are still plenty of face value tickets left. If anyone bids on those ebay tickets, it will confirm for me the intelligence level of the folks who want to see a television evangelist in the first place...
At 6:03 pm,
Jenni said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
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