LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — A ticketing snafu with Live Nation's online ticketing service has aroused the ire of many of the band's fans.
When tickets for Phish's upcoming reunion tour went on sale on Jan. 30, Live Nation's new ticketing website came to a standstill under the weight of customer demand.
"At the moment of the on sale, there were 1 million people trying to buy tickets, and that overwhelmed the system for a minute," a Live Nation spokesman told Rolling Stone "We sold all the tickets to all the shows. At the end of the day, it was successful."
That wasn't quite the story being told in the blogosphere, where irate fans reported problems with having to re-enter credit card details multiple times, web pages failing to load properly and a litany of other issues.
"While I’m all for a little competition in the marketplace, I gotta tell you the past few days made me nostalgic for my old pal Ticketmaster" said one poster on Jamtopia. These issues were compounded by the fact that Live Nation's website only allows for a limited time window to complete a ticket transaction and the delays left many fans being forced to start at square one after delays made the process take longer than the allotted time. Rolling Stone reported that calls to Live Nation during the ticket buying process also were also experiencing problems with the phone ringing once followed by a long pause and finally disconnection.
The Live Nation ticketing problems didn't keep all of Phish's scheduled dates from selling out completely.
"We sold out everywhere we went on sale," the band's agent, Chip Hooper at Paradigm told Billboard.com. "We put up two Jones Beaches, a Camden, N.J., an Asheville, N.C., Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Indianapolis. Every show sold out very quickly." – CelebrityAccess Staff Writer
