We've all heard of concert tickets that sold out in record time. Last year Garth Brooks sold more than 140,000 tickets in a day to a benefit show. Lady Antebellum sold out an arena in Georgia in seven minutes last year as well. Most recently, Coachella sold all of its 75,000 tickets in five days. As of today, LCD Soundsystem's farewell show at Madison Square Garden can be added to the list of those artists, except this time, nobody wins.
How could LCD Soundsystem tickets sell out, yet pretty much nobody at all was able to access the tickets that were on sale? LCD has been wondering that themselves too, and they've been expressing their outrage and frustration on their Twitter (@lcdsoundsystem) all day.
"Ok... did ANYone get a ticket? shit. please tell me? #gotaticket" was posted on their Twitter, followed by, "seriously--NO ONE? NO ONE on here?" The band then stated that they're trying to work things out with Ticketmaster to figure out what happened. After all, when someone's selfish enough to have created a Ticketmaster/LiveNation empire in the first place, accidents can happen since there's only one source for tickets. When Paul McCartney tickets for his concert in Mexico City went on sale last summer, his fans' demand was so high that it crashed the Ticketmaster servers. Springsteen fans have also had their share of issues with Ticketmaster too. Could there have been a glitch with the event's Ticketmaster page?
It seems as though, apart from a few exceptions, the only people who were able to get ahold of tickets are those who bought tickets during the presale period or those who used the American Express deal. This extreme ticket crisis has caused scalpers to have a field day, which means that StubHub's been poppin'. Tickets are currently being resold on StubHub for as low as $120 for one seat and as high as an unthinkable and very greedy $11,000 for 17 spots in the general admission pit. Twitter users are already suggesting that LCD Soundsystem should have a free show in Central Park to make up for all the chaos, like M.I.A. did this summer to make it up to her fans for a previous shit-tastic show. The Village Voice has also collected a slew of angry tweets that were posted in response to this unusual occurrence. Madness, I say!
Clearly there's something fishy going on here. If a venue the size of Madison Square Garden sold out in seconds but there was a four-ticket limit per Ticketmaster buyer, how on earth did these tickets get claimed so quickly? How could someone on StubHub be selling 17 tickets?
StubHub and/or robots seem to be the culprit for now. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem had been tweeting his dismay for StubHub last night. He wrote, "hey @StubHub... i pretty much guarantee "fans" aren't pricing these tickets. you're barely legal and you know it." He also wrote, "1500 for a single ticket? Fuck you, scalpers. You are parasites. I HATE you," in addition to "Eat shit @StubHub." Hell yeah, James! Way to stick it to the man. It's really respectable that the band is being so proactive about finding out who's behind this. Right now it's unclear what will come of this interesting incident, so while James Murphy works hard to figure out how to solve this mess, all we can do is refuse to support those scalpers at all costs and hope for an unlikely second farewell show.
