Just look at all the comments on here of angry Phish fans…

Has anyone heard of a new music-related ticketing company called Ticketfly? Not launched yet, but planning to treat the customer like a human instead of a head of cattle ’bout to be zapped?! Man there’s got to be a better way.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love it.

Just like what happened at Woodstock. NOT

Since our beloved former vp Al Gore was nice enough to invent the internet we have seen…..

1. Illegal downloading ruin the recording industry.

2. Legalized scalping and the ability to disable average Americans from paying face value for a concert ticket, and wait a minute, concert tickets are also a hell of a lot more expensive now a days.

When I was a teenager back in the 80’s I was able to afford to go to one or two concerts a month since most were under 20 bucks anyway. And I’m talking about Metallica, U2, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi and The Dead, who I happened to see all in 85-86. The combined ticket prices for all of those bands was less than 100 bucks. You can’t get a nosebleed for any of those bands for that!

Shouldn’t it be Phish Phans Phurious? Either way, meh. Welcome to the new world order, hippies.

It wasn’t just Phish fans. I tried to buy tickets for the Music as a Weapon tour and the same issues happened (which took me an hour to get through after numerous “time outs”). It was by far the WORST ticketing system I have ever encountered, and Live Nation’s lack of customer service representatives answering phones was infuriating.

how bout that live nation *just* launched their ticketing system? we’re lucky we even have another alternative to ticketmaster. hopefully they’ll get their act together in a hurry. i hear they actually care about the fan. they just don’t know what they are doing yet.

wait and see…

I had a major problem buying Bruce tickets from Ticketmaster this morning. I managed to get tickets to decent seats, entered my credit card info, then processing… processing… processing… error. Sorry, no tickets for you.

I tried again but of course by now it was 9:04, so all the tickets had been sold to TM’s scalper buddies so they could resell them for triple the price on Ticketsnow and give TM a commission (getting paid twice for the same product- is this consumer-friendly?).

The second time I tried to get tix? I got a message saying the ticketing system was unavailable due to routine maintenance. Apparently TM thinks a good time to schedule maintenance is ten minutes after the hottest ticket in the country goes on sale.

Bottom line, whether you go with LiveNation or Ticketmaster (not that you have a choice for a particular event), you always lose.

This is still Clearchannel raping your for the right to buy tickets, just because they changed names, dont forget it who they are. Theyre screwing artists and fans now all over europe and you cant escape their clutches now if you want to play in most places there.
What happened to old way of mail ordering the Dead and Phish used to do on top of the regular ways?

As for tickets prices, I remember seeing Santana one year at 28$, the next at 38$ and finally the third year at 44$ for the same seats. That was the last time I saw him play because I thought it was ridiculous.
So, I am definitely in the ‘Paying 100$ per show is idiotic’ camp.
I still see plenty of shows now but they are more local acts with tickets in the 10-20$ range and I am getting as entertained as I was a decade ago. But there is no way in hell, I am paying 100$ FOR ANY BAND! It would be nice to take the wife and kids to see Phish once but tickets for a family of 5 demands a small loan now.

God, these greedy, soul-sucking corporations just get more and more despicable. Like “The internet” above, I remember seeing many, many major arena shows for $20 a pop back in the 80s. Inflation you say? I don’t see a commensurate inflation in salaries, especially for working folks who should be any real band’s bread and butter. Ah, screw it. What’s the point. Any company that has the audacity to charge an almost 50% “F-you fee” can suck a fat one as far as I’m concerned.

Where’s Fugazi when you need them?

I was able to get through today for Springsteen tickets, but Ticketmaster website and ticket buying process has completely changed. Unbelievably slow and the seats I acquired were less than desireable. Hopefully live nation gets their act together because U2 signed on with them and the traffic for their shows is going to be even more crazy then Phish. Its depressing when you try to buy tickets knowing that so many are already allocated to brokers and corporations. Such a corrupt system and its shameful that they are allowed to conduct business this way.

I love the fact that before tickets went on sale this morning there were hundreds listed for sale on Stubhub. I got screwed for the Phish shows, got screwed for Bruce in Philly but i was “lucky” enough to get tickets for Bruce in Hershey. This is a disgrace! What more does the common fan have to do to see his favorite band! This whole systme ensures resale ticketsites like Stubhub and Razorgator stay in business because you can’t get good seats anymore.

It happens to the best of them. There is just simply nothing any server can do when several millions of people hit the same website within 10 seconds. Ticketmaster’s site blew up this morning and posted a “routine maintenance” message for 3 Bruce Springsteen shows that went up for sale today.

Consumers need to be more educated and realize that popular ticket onsales are messy and not everyone gets tickets. If you really want tickets to the show that has 100 times the demand of available seats, then you should have someone at home trying on the computer and someone at a Blockbuster location… and you should both be calling Live Nation on the phone at the same time. Good luck, no need to whine if you’re prepared to fight for tickets to these popular shows.

everything is awesome. you’re awesome, i’m awesome, jesus is awesome…

I couldn’t even get past the picking out the type of ticket i wanted stage… oh well! E-BAY BABY!

“you should have someone at home trying on the computer and someone at a Blockbuster location”

Ok, I will have the person renting my movies to me try to get tickets at the same time…genius. I never thought to go to a video rental store to get ticket! That explains so much!

People do realize that the process is messy. They don’t expect to lose their tickets while their credit cards are being processed though. Or have the site collapse. These companies have enough money that they should be able to avoid situations like those.

PS. Marty works for LiveNation

F*ck livenation, they are terrible.

shit was slow as hell but in the end i got the tix to the shows i wanted….

you can thank the brokers and scalpers for the mojority of the problems. They infest the marketplace. Many user accounts, mass credit cards, and inside help. How disgusting is it that Ticketmaster owns and operates a ticket broker. Now tell me that there isn’t something shady going on with that.
How are brokers legal, and why the hell doesn’t the law enforcement at the shows crack down on scalpers anymore.
I understand that some fans will still not get tickets. At least we could level the playing field a little.

i can’t believe how they downplay the disaster that was LiveNation. i did end up with tickets, but i was online for 2 1/2 hours! i was in the shopping cart at least 4 times, in the queue at least 2 dozen. they should be ashamed to have such a sh*tty system – and yeah, 1 million people hitting the website at once will create probs, but it could have at least held onto everyone in a queue that actually worked.

p.s. liveNation didnt mention that their phone system wasnt working as well – it would hang up on people rather than keeping them on hold. so it wasnt just the web technicalities.

live nation suuuuuuuuuuuuux

Artie Lange is a no talent hack!! I also was able to buy every ticket I could and will be selling them back to you guys at 5 X the price. So be checking ebay soon.

See ya at the Fox Theatre!!

I got tix to every show i wanted, all reserved seats. For people to say TM is better is ridiculous. Most of us who got tix, would have had lawn because of their TicketsNow.com who resell the better seats at ridiculous prices. LiveNation will fix their issues and the future looks bright, for us and them.

I can’t believe they just said this is a “new ticketing service”!

It was apparently connected with JSP pages and (probably ancient) Windows DLLs. Two separate login accounts required. Sessions getting dropped all over the place.

Gum and rubber bands held that thing together.

LiveNation’s on-sale was a rookie effort, and these guys look to be years behind Ticketmaster’s site. (And no, I’m no fan of TM!)

meh

““At the moment of the onsale, there were 1 million people trying to buy tickets, and that overwhelmed the system for a minute,””

A minute?? It took me 20 minutes to successfully get tickets on 1/30 – and I never did manage to get any on 1/31.

To call this a “success” is a total joke.

Apparently the scalpers had no problems getting Phish tickets. 20 minutes after the tickets went on sale, sites were offering them for $200-$1500. That’s the real crime here.

The scalping industry is sickening, stubhub and all those guys… They’re preying off of the working man.Nope, no more tickets for the Dead also, unless you pay a couple hundered dollars/ person.

I got 2000 Phish tickets! Woo-hoo!

Problems for a minute? Are they serious? I tried all day long, getting to various stages of ticket purchase on a pair of computers on two different networks and when I finally started to make progress mid-afternoon, the tickets we’re gone.

I’m happy the band is aware there was an issue but what are those of us without tickets supposed to do? Pay the scalpers? Screw that.

“There is just simply nothing any server can do when several millions of people hit the same website within 10 seconds.”

You’re right. There is no possible way to stagger sales days and times so that a million people don’t actually hit the site at the same time. Nor is there any way to boost server capacity, even temporarily. Nor is there any way to expect a sudden onslaught and put in such ridiculous things as waiting rooms *before* they’re needed.

And yet, they still have the audacity to charge service fees, even in the face of an utter lack of service…

The problems lasted for hours, it was not a success as the Live Nation person says because everyone kept losing their tickets. Their is a way to solve the problem and it is you use more servers.

The same servers should not be used for ticket request and for credit card info, if you seperated the two alot of this would never have happened.

I hope the Live Nation ticket service fails.

I think the only way of really dealing with this problem is to convince bands to support a system in which the name of the purchaser is on the ticket. Then the person must be there to use the tickets. If it turns out that you cant go, you should be able to sell the ticket back to the venue as long as demand is still high.
If it was my band I wouldnt want the douchebags with big walets to be the ones at my show, I would want the ones who care enough to try to buy the tickets as soon as they go onsale.

Tom Waits does it right- 2 tickets, you have to show the credit card used to buy the tix as you walk in, they scan your card and print the tix, and you have to enter at that time. No scalping

Yeah, I get it that the Live Nation site had a lot of traffic, and you can’t expect everything to go perfectly.

BUT…

I think people would be more understanding if they hadn’t been able to pull tickets, enter their info, and enter their CC # all within the “15 minute” ticket purchase window (which was really only like 6-8 minutes). Only to then have their sweet pavilion seats go back into the pool all because of the website errors, non responsiveness, and time outs.

That was total BS.

Sell concert tickets to fix the economy.. Let people buy as many as they want. Never sell a show out. Music and artists roles in the country are understated. Phish should do a FREE* tour with all proceeds going towards eco education, music and arts foundations for schools, and a percentage towards an alternate plan to fix the economy.

Its a shame when artists charge 35 dollars for a t shirt, and in some cases- 200 dollars a ticket. Think where the money could be redirected. Phish doesnt need any more money.

That’s what you get for mixing hippies, greed and technology.

Tell me again why the Phish reunion tour isn’t a free tour for the “legions” of Phish “fans”? Oh, that’s right. There are no more actual hippies left…just yuppies with poor hygiene and bad taste in music.

quit bitching people, I didn’t get all the tickets I wanted but I got some and realistically this system was the fairest system, on Ticketmaster those shows would have been sold out in 5 minutes, at least we had a chance with LN. Realize for every one of your carts that was dumped so was a scalpers!!! Was it frustrating, yes, but in the end I believe more phans pulled tickets because of the errors in the system than would have if the system worked properly.

Nathan Hubbard listen up! How can my secured ticket from your site be returned to the general inventory due to timing out after 15 minutes when the tickets went on sale at 10AM CST and it was 10:09AM CST? Just curious, have you ever heard of alpha, beta or regression testing before product launch? Your site is a joke and if you stand by it as it is then I sir believe you are a joke as well. Sincerely hoping you get screwed trying to acquire something you’re desparate for.
Brett Barbour of Minnetonka, MN.

What SLAYS me is that the grievance against TM is the service charges, but we’re seeing them just as high on LN. I bought two $42 tickets that each carried $20 in service charges.

I got two tix to the last show…took about a half hour.

LN is probably running some MySQL and PHP scrapped together too quickly and cheaply.

The nice thing is that the concert didn’t sell out in 10 seconds.

I have Jones Beach extra’s for $250 a pop. Email me.

I work in customer service, ticketing for Live Nation. Yes the system was bombarded by the Phsih fans. BUT as for the customers that say that it was an unfair process are incorrect.

The customers that I spoke today the even went on sale (1/30/09) were able to get best available tickets for an hour plus after they went on sale, although what was left wasn’t the best seating it was available. And if the customer kept re-dialing our number they would’ve been able to reach us.

So for those customers that were screaming “I’ve been trying to buy F#@$^%& tickets from your website for the past hour” was it not evident that our website was down and that the best solution would be for you to call us? Our call center application were all up and running, even though a few of our call switches were down.

I’ve no doubt Phish will use us again for their future events, because as a band they understand that technical difficulties are like.

Thanks,
Carol

F U Carol your site sucks. I would have had front row tix if your people would not have hung up on me. You can’t even get it right when someone gets through. Thanks for nothing. I even begged you not to put me on hold. Come to think of it the idiot I was talking too was Carol. Once again FU

Why isnt live nation liable for this. Obviously hundreds of people got screwed. They should at least off something in return for the problem. Its sad that they have no problem pissing this many people off. I tried all day and every time i got a ticket i got an error message. Not to mention the numerous times i got booted before even getting close or the neverending waiting room.

bring em back and we can all get in and dance

this was total shit. i tried at least 100 times to buy tix and never got any! I also tried to pre-order tix from phish directly and got none from them either.
Thanks a lot guys!

i cant believe anyone from this site is saying anything other than “Sorry, we are useless pieces of garbage. Our equipment and technology blows, we screw everyone out of tickets and pretend it didnt happen. Then dish out anal rapings to all who actually got tickets…

I hope Live Nation, and the employees who are backing the company, trip into a bucket of plague, and die…

I tried for hours to get tix to the Jones Beach shows…nada. For the most important show at Great Woods (I refuse to call it the comcast center) I decided to go to the venue. Got there at 4 am to find a sign saying come back at 9 because it’s a lottery. Luckily I got there at 8 and got my “lottery ticket” because the lottery was called at 9. I did get good seats at least, but I know it’s because some other PhishHead got screwed which makes me feel crappy. I also had a group of middleaged scumbag scalpers behind me in line. They are the true enemy!

and to rid scalpers, every ticket purchase requires the buyer to complete a questionaire with random band related questions…

dont know the answers, dont deserve to see the band…

will limit scalpers and dumbasses from takin all the tix

??

Wow, I had absolutely trouble getting my tix.

if you can’t handle the surge of people, then why not sell each show on a different day? LN proved they are unable to even think inside the box, let alone outside! now we can spend three times as much, buying from some prick who probably only bought their tix to resell them at an ungodly price. nice job LN….

After an hour an a half of franticly clicking and reentering my info and typing those ridiculous words and getting error after error i FINALLY got two tickets to the June 4th show!
sadly my friend who woke me up to remind me to get tickets wasn’t as lucky

Carol,

To say the process was fair is absurd. Your website didn’t work properly. Your phone lines didn’t work properly. A friend of mine and I tried to access your site and your phone number from 10am until you were sold out to no avail.

LiveNation is terrible, and I just learned today that they’re being merged with equally-as-terrible Ticketmaster. I hope an investigation of Ticketmaster (soon to be YOUR parent company) is performed and it results in some true reforms.

We’re not buying this BS of “it wasn’t our fault, you should’ve called” when we COULDN’T get through. There are no excuses. For the money both you and Ticketmaster charge in convience fees, you can afford a fair system that actually works.

Live Nation = Wilson

Carol,

I’d love to know your full name. You stated that fans were able to call via phone to order tickets. I had 4 phones redialing that number for over 2 hours, and all I got each time was 40 seconds of ringing, and then a disconnection. Nice job there. I don’t understand how you guys can’t take blame for this monstrosity of site and its problems. Phish fans did everything in their power to order tickets, and you, LiveNation, did not do everything in your power to give us those tickets. I understand that shows sell out, sure, but to be ridiculed and told that-

“I’ve no doubt Phish will use us again for their future events, because as a band they understand that technical difficulties are like”

is getting laughed at and spit at. The fact that you offer no apology for this anger you have caused is disgusting, and extremely unprofessional. But oh, that’s right, you guys don’t care about professionalism; you’ll screw us right to our faces.

Carol is Wilson

Carol is indeed the lizard king.

She didn’t even finish her last sentence, i wonder what she was thinking…

“I’ve no doubt Phish will use us again for their future events, because as a band they understand that technical difficulties are like…”

are like what, Carol?

are like not my problem?

are like the worst thing ever but I don’t care?

are completely unfair and making people actually wish phish was still selling tickets through ticketmaster?
________________ _________

I love phish, and I was ready at my computer to buy them, as a non-scalper, at exactly the time they went on sale. I don’t know who this “Carol” talked to, but certainly not me and my honest phishhead friends.

Now I know what happened to me. My favorite band at my favorite venue (my first Alpine Valley show was the Dead at age 18, 1985). I had tickets in my basket 5 times for this show and could not complete the transaction as an error message came up. These tickets were on sale Saturday after this Friday mishap. Why did they let this happen? I used to postmark my ticket requests at 12:01 at the airport just to make sure as a kid. This kind of stuff just ain’t as fun as back in the day. I guess I need a miracle..

Could’ve gotten lawnies for face with Ticketbastard, my old foe. THIS SUCKS! Apparently the ticket brokers computers didn’t freeze up. Hmmmmm…

Many of us have ordered tickets to more total concerts than your company has had the good fortune to have the responsibility to sell tickets to. Many of us jump through the necessary hoops to assure ourselves the opportunity to do something we hold dear. Don’t lecture us on the ticket buying process. We were there and ready, your company let us down. Your company let me down in a way that makes me sad in a “faith in humanity” sense. Shame on you for lecturing us. You know it makes me wild, with forty years upon my head to have you call me child. (to all of you hippie haters, love up this post, you’re welcome!)

WOW! We dealt with livenation.com on 1/30 for 2+ hours and did not get tickets. Then, we dealt with it again on 1/31 with 2 computers AND two phones calling. There are NO blockbuster outlets open in our area or we would have been there in a heartbeat (I prefer face-to-face or venue buys). It took 2.5 hours on Saturday before we got tickets. I would have given up but I heard that the day before people got tickets when others gave up around 11CST/12EST (2 hours after tickets went on sale). This is ridiculous! PLUS, the telephone service hangs up on you instead of putting you on hold. How is that fair? Only if I am the lucky caller who was able to get through in the millisecond opening would I have a chance? I have NEVER dealt with such shoddy dealings. Plus, $20+ a ticket in charges (including parking) is MORE than ticketmaster. I am incredibly disappointed with LiveNation. They have lost my business. I always buy at the venue unless it is out of state (as these shows were) and I can’t be there to get them. If they had the 500 Blockbuster outlets open as they had stated they were going to (buy the end of Jan, which has now been pushed back to Mar.) there would have been more equal distribution of fans!

I think fans are most frustrated because LN claim that tickets were sold fairly and due to high demand we could not get through, hinting at the fact that they sold out quickly. That absolutely is not true! EVERYONE that I know who got tickets to Deer Creek or Alpine Valley got them OVER two hours after tickets went on sale. Now, we were all trying for that entire 2 hours, but still— is it fair to expect fans to spend that much time waiting to get tickets after they go on sale. Not to mention how many times I had to put my credit card info in due to “errors”.

As a company they did not live up to their promise of delivering tickets to fans and being a customer service ticket broker. I will be writing to the Better Business Bureau and other consumer affairs entities and I encourage others who had similar negative experiences to do so also.

I hope that they have learned from this disaster and the next big sale goes much better. It would be nice to have ticketing competition, but not at the expense of the fans.

Boy, you Phish freaks are practically frothing at the bit over this! Y’all are a bunch of bottom feeders anyway,lolololol

I can hardly muster words to say about this. I am so dissapointed that I have waited 5 years for this only to have some new company destroy my only chance at resonable tickets to this tour. Thanks Live nation. For what it worth I tried Ticketmasters sister Co. Ticketsnow and had the same result. Well screw me for bein a phish phan!

Carol your a straight up liar, end of story. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are in bed with all the brokers.

“I can hardly muster words to say about this. I am so dissapointed that I have waited 5 years for this only to have some new company destroy my only chance at resonable tickets to this tour.”

I, too, am a big fan and was very frustrated at not being able to buy tickets either day when they went on sale, but let’s not forget that 1,000,000 or so people were trying to log on to buy tickets those mornings (every Phish fan plus every scalper in the country+). If anyone turned on their computer that morning expecting to get tickets, then maybe your expectations were a little unrealistic. I would never say that LN was fully prepared for the action their website got that day, but I did want to add a little perspective to this whole discussion.

I just got my Ticket today in the mail for deercreek. I was smart and created my profile before they went on sale….c’mon we all should of done that. You had to expect that it was going to be as crazy as it was.

I have been reading all these comments from unhappy Phish fans. Think about what you are saying before you vent. With everyone trying to get on to buy tickets at the same interval of time, servers can only handle so much. As far as the phones go, if the queue is full it is not uncommon to have the system hang up. Sure you are upset,
I am too when I can not by tickets to an event I want to attend because the price is too high or seats are sold out. Perhaps Phish will realize that their fans were not able to see them in concert and extend their tour. It is always easy to blame others when we do not get what we are pursuing.By the way, the name is Live Nation there is no adjective in the prefix of their name.

Responding to Realistic: It wasn’t a little hiccup when the tickets went on sale. I got an error message for the first 3 hours the tickets were on sale. After 2 hours, I had the tickets in my cart only to have the 7 minute timer run out because the site couldn’t process my information. I finally got 2 tickets but I wanted 4, which were available in hour 2. This never happened with Ticketmaster. I’m not defending Ticketmaster, they’re the worst, but at least their website worked.

I was on my computer for 2 and a half hours to get my SINGLE ticket to Jones Beach on Friday night
I’m sorry to those that weren’t as lucky. It was complete BULLSH**

Does anyone know a freakin phone number to get to a person at live nation??? They charged my card multiple times and I didn’t get any tickets!! wtf…how can I speak to a real person????

What they should do is bring back the old system. LINE UP FOR TICKETS. Cuts out the scalper and rewards the people who deserve them. Server errors or not..Its just bullshit. I never use to have a problem camping out for tickets.
BRING IT BACK PLEASE!!!!

hahha everyone hates carol/ wilson
dude phish just needs to start playin in corn fields and shit no more venues they cant hold the phans, phish in the fields phish in the phields phish in the phields lol see ya on shakedown

I was on-line for hours and also called FOR HOURS each day and NEVER got to even be placed on hold, let alone get through to a human being. If your lying is representative of how LiveNation does business, we are all in big trouble.

Look, F*UK it, lets just say this, For Carol, and any other LiveNation worker, forget what we are telling you about the past, us phans only care about one thing! SEEING PHISH, at a decent price and not getting scared as HELL when trying to buy our tickets, So please, JUST DO US ALL this favor, and put all YOUR ENERGY INTO THE March,29th, Shoreline release, and all other late august releases to come, JUSt make sure your site DOESN”T do what you just said it won’t do in the future! FOR GODS SAKE

Doesn’t seem like anything has changed.

Doesn’t seem like anything has changed.

System again failed miserably! I could not even sign into my account until 3 minutes after tickets went on sale and the “buy now” Icon would not even appear on one the page until 5 minutes after that! Its a big F#*%ing Scam! Some how thousands of scalpers got tickets but phans cant. MAIL ORDER ONLY!

Well, Live Nation has succeeded in ruining Phish’s reputation for making sure the fans get to the tickets before the scalpers. At 12:00:00 PM, PDT, they were “sold out” online; however a direct call to Shoreline confirmed that the venue was not technically sold out until about 12:30. The 30 minutes of clicking on my part in-between showed no love. But, I just got the same tickets at twice the face value via a scalper site (shorlinetickets.com) -no waiting. Is LIve Nation flawed? Hmmm.

WTF???? It happened again idiot Carol. Today Was shoreline AMP theater sale for Phish in california. I had my cousin IN CALIFORNIA try the phone numbers why I tried the online system , this time. LN F’ed up again! We couldn’t even get Lawn tickets!!! the ONE time it said we got through when we hit continue it wouldn’t even go anywhere, this is so ridiculous, how the hell do you get TICKETS to see PHISH, i got denied through the lottery, ticketmaster jacks up the price to 4392 dollars, and Livenations infrastructure cannot support even one ticket online. DID anybody get tickets online through LN?

Do they actually expect me to believe that they received 1 million legitimate hits for Phish tickets. Give me a break.

Thank-you live nation, i got my tickets with no problem while i couldn’t even sniff tickets from ticketmaster for the rocks or the gorge. Scalpers suck

Yeah, it took afew hours, but I got all four tix.I wanted for the Deer Creek show. Come to find out the band is shutting down their own lot scene. No thanks. Check Indy’s craigslist for four tix. They’re will-call, so I’ll have to go with you to get the tix.

I just (9/26/09) lost 1/2 hour’s worth of better seating trying to get Steely Dan tix at LiveNation online, same problems as above. I only could get them after I called their phone number, 1-888-598-4299- much better service. AND it costs $18 now!:?@#+!

Why can’t we just get tix from the theaters like we used to? Go down the box office and pick them up. Now you have every ticket agent (legalized scalpers) in the world getting the good seats first.