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    COBU
    15 years 3 months ago
    I was so very disappointed
    I was so very disappointed this morning when i was unable to purchase pre-sale tickets. I went on at 10:30pm knowing I woulndt be able to get any tickets, I just wanted to make sure that there werent, by some miracle, still tickets left. At 11:00pm I was able to purchase tickets to Grensboro, DC, Albany and Worster. I was not able to get tickets to MSG
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    joetroy
    15 years 3 months ago
    Pre-sale flop . . .
    AND I SAY AGAIN (my comments from the "Spring Tour" forum -I find it necessary to post here as well) . . . I am truly disappointed with the way the pre-sale went down. I would have thought that if anyone could have provided a fair ticket-buying experience it would have been the Dead "organization" and their ticket vendor. Turns out they can't; like every other shyster promoter out there, my experience today was actually the worst experience I've EVER HAD in buying pre-sale tickets. I've had much better experiences through Ticketmaster and Live Nation (who knows . . . they're probably both at the root of this debacle anyway) and that ain't sayin' much. Take a gander at how many tickets are being sold by scalpers already! How does that happen?! It happens because the "safeguards" that were in place did nothing but safeguard the STATUS-QUO, thereby allowing every scalper out there to get the lions' share of every good seat available, and freezing out the rest of us! Have The Dead forgot those of us deadheads who have been with them since the beginning?! It sure feels like it. I had an incredibly frustrating time in my attempt to purchase tickets - I just wanted ONE ticket for each of the couple of shows I wanted to attend - and it turned out way too confusing, convoluted, and skewed to make it worth the $115 cost for a seat and a date I really didn't want and to which it took an hour-plus to finally achieve the end result [without being bumped out, frozen out, or otherwise timed-out as I had throughout] before I was able to complete my purchase. My first Dead show was 33 years ago. If today was any indication of how the future of the Dead's ticket distribution will look like, then this May 2009 will be it for me. It's just not worth the aggravation, cost, and disappointment, where the system allows those who are honest fans to get beaten over by scalpers once again. There . . . I got that off my chest. PS:Thanks for so many incredible shows! Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark make everything from toy guns that spark to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark it's easy to see without looking too far not much is really sacred. B Dylan
  • streetcat
    15 years 3 months ago
    Shakedown Street- ticket fiasco
    What a drag! Being from the Bay Area I have obviousley been spoiled with the abundance of dead shows here at home over the last 40 years,that being said only 1 home-town show? a pre-sale that was a train wreck for everyone. Lack of ticket availability for the entire world of deadheads. Overpriced tickets starting at about $477.00 for upper reserved ticketsthat were available on internet sites before the presale even started. The actual face value tickets for the shows thru the dead an average of $100.00 before bamboozling fees. That is not what the band I grew up with.They do not treat there fans that way,or at least they did not use to.What happened to our once beloved hero's? Where is the Workingman's Dead during this time of economic hardship for so many people in this country as well as in the rest of the world. For those of you who suffered through this pre-sale fiasco and did not receive tickets,hopefully the general public on sale will work a little better for the few remaining tickets. For those of you lucky enough to get tickets through the presale,enjoy the shows.
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16 years 4 months
This what MusicToday originally offered me when I hit the Buy link at the stroke of Noon EST. Of course I hit continue. Then I had the audacity to attempt to change the shipping method, and that's when the server errors started. Needless to say after the 45 minutes it took to get their server to agree to interact with my browser again, all tickets were long gone, never mind the halfway decent floor seats I thought I had. If you can't make it out that's MSG, Section 11, Row J, seats 9 and 10. I'm so happy MusicToday chose to rely on Microsoft technologies for their server application. Just another example of their commitment to robust, stable, scalable, and standards-compliant software. I hope everyone who didn't get screwed because of inherent bias in the underlying technology has a good time at the show. Wish I coulda been there.
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15 years 4 months
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I should have included in my rant that I did not think it was the intention of the original poster to start a big negativity thread. I could be wrong but it doesn't seem that way. Even he wished the lucky ones well. Why did somebody label all these tapes with "mono sodium glutamate"?
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16 years 4 months
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My original beef, my cause for consternation, wasn't with the prices of the tickets but with the customer experience I had to endure at the virtual hands of the ticket sales vendor whom I view as a subcontractor. Don't offer me a pair of floor seats for The Dead at MSG unless you intend to and are capable of delivering them. That's not nice. Or kind. I did everything I was supposed to do in my role as the customer, and their process failed. I (and apparently many others) didn't. Adding to my frustration is that I am a software developer. Most of the software I work on is partitioned, client server style, network style, web style. Virtually all of it is used to collect, process, record and report on transactions for financial services companies. Much of it deals with orders of magnitude greater volume than was generated by the pre-sale, all day, every day. So when I get the short end of the stick courtesy of some other developer's shoddy code, it's doubly annoying. Especially when I can tell that they've relied on technologies I would never even consider using for such an application due to their inadequacy to the task. When I had calmed down a bit and accepted my fate, I actually googled the error message I got which was utterly memorable as it's such a classic example of Microspeak: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." For those of you not up to speed on Microspeak, or OO programming in general, allow me to translate into English: "Oops, guess I shouldn't have reassigned that chunk of memory you were using. But I did, and whatever you had stored there is gone. Too bad. You lose." Anyway, sure enough, there it was, a known bug documented in the knowledgebase. For the morbidly curious, see for yourself! For the rest of you hopefully more sane and less anal people, hope you got the tickets you wanted and have a great time at the show or shows you make it to. As for me and the rest of us who got closed out, well, maybe our luck will be better during the public sale. And if you actually made it through all the above technobabble without your head exploding, you're either another software geek or you obviously didn't go to enough shows. Peace out, folks, and be kind. Conversation is always more interesting than recitation, so speak your mind and not someone else's.
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15 years 3 months
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I'm sorry to hijack the thread .. or whatever.. but i have a question.. If the internet tickets are "sold out" does that mean that mail order tickets are too? It says the show I want to see is sold out..Could I still receive tickets through the mail? thanks.
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16 years 4 months
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which could certainly be the case, the pre-sale vendor's inventory is sold out, not all inventory. I suspect that GDTS was given allotments for each show that are a separate portion of the inventory, and another block has been held back for the "public" sale. Again, I'm just guessing here, I'm no authority. Conversation is always more interesting than recitation, so speak your mind and not someone else's.
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15 years 3 months
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So, I'm going to send off my money order today...sound like a good idea? Good chance I'll get 3 tickets? heh..What if they don't send anything back heh...
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16 years 4 months
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If you haven't sent them already you may be a little late in the postmark parade. But if they can't hook you up, you will get your money orders back. GDTS is righteous that way. Best bet at this stage is probably the "public" sale. Conversation is always more interesting than recitation, so speak your mind and not someone else's.
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16 years 10 months
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Is showing both Live Nation AND Ticketmaster as vendors for the public sale. You can be sure that they both have tix to sell....but where to go? With multiple vendors you'd think the competition would result in lower prices...that's how it's supposed to work isn't it? I've made this obviously naive and goofy observation in another post, but like dreaming about a possible summer tour, I know it's fantasy and not fact. Fact is though, that there should still be face-price tix available (plus, you know, "convenience" fees and such) for the general sale. I just feel great about somehow slipping through the page-by-page traps that MusicToday set for us all and scored 10th row floor for Greensboro. It's the only show I can see, at least the seats are great!
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15 years 7 months
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yeah, this seemed a lot tuffer then usual but at least I got 160 shows under the belt. funny thing here the ticket window is still opened, just went there for Chicago, said they had some upper P1 tixs avail at $100 and then I put in 1 and it says it cant fill it??? WDF?? Phish was able to pull off the same thing and it went like butta * At this moment there are not enough tickets available to fulfill your request. Please try again using a lower quantity of tickets or choosing a different ticket type. o Currently there are not enough Upper P1 tickets to fulfill your request. SOOOOO why is it avail?? A MAJOR SNAFU!!!
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15 years 1 month
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pretty much same story..different venue...waited for an hour to even get into the site..got in and had Floor seats to Wachovia Spectrum..then the damn system locked up when I hit continue it said I need to re-try or something. I did and viola..now I am the lucky holder of seats in the 300 level. arggh!!