Heads-Up
Antony & the Johnsons
What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where this innovative act’s new album "The Crying Light" can enter the European chart at number one, notching a #2 in Spain and Sweden, #3 in Denmark, #4 in France, Holland and Norway, #9 in Italy and #18 in the United Kingdom, selling 10,000 copies in this island nation with one-fifth the population of the United States, and debuts in the U.S. at number 65 with a measly 7,837 copies sold?
Are Europeans just that more sophisticated, or does radio suck just that badly in the U.S? We have a black President, why can’t we have a transgendered musical act on TV? For the self-professed "greatest country in the world", we certainly seem to be backward when it comes to the arts. Only interested in what is lowest common denominator, that which can be easily sold, we’ve eviscerated our cultural institutions, we’re an international laughingstock. In America, Interscope is tying in with a candy company to sell a barely pubescent act
whereas in Europe Antony & the Johnsons are on TV and are embraced for their originality.
Maybe out of today’s disarray a new world order will emerge where how talented you are, how original you can be, are more important factors than how good-looking you are, how many times you appear in the gossip media.
The Phish Ticket Meltdown
I started getting complaints about Live Nation’s ticketing system last week. But today, my inbox is filling up with Phishheads pulling their hair out, because LN’s ticket system sucks so bad.
Which every insider knew it would.
Castigate Ticketmaster all you want, but the company at least knows how to sell tickets. But when you sit in front of your computer and tickets are available but you can’t get them because of glitches in the system, you go berserk.
8:15 A.M.You must write about this travesty. I have been trying to get Phish tickets online for almost 1.25 hours now and the system still will not even process a "request", will not even show what tickets are available. The LiveNation HOMEPAGE will barely load. This is a crock of shit. I NEED TICKETMASTER!!!!
Adam Beasley
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8:39 A.M.
Holy Moly. And I ‘hated’ Ticketmaster? Live Nation is an absolute disaster. Today, Phish tickets went on sale, with a majority of the venues being serviced by the "new" LN ticketing service exclusively. Crash, bang boom. Errors on entering number of tickets, errors on entering username, errors entering the Captcha words, basically one big fucking error everywhere. You know, you would think that if LN was going to get into this business, that they might upgrade some of their servers to handle the added load. Maybe they can use the Phish on-sale as a disaster drill, so when U2 goes on sale, at least buyers can either buy a ticket or be told it is sold out without getting an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error.
Unbelievable.
John McCormack
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11:01 A.M.
I started making requests for Jones Beach tix at 10:00 am. I kept getting errors of different types. I would finally get to a section where I could choose a seat, submit the request and again, error. The homepage is back up, the phone lines are completely swamped, I don’t live next to a Blockbuster, and tickets are now up on StubHub for $200+. I wouldn’t be upset but for the fact that I kept submitting requests for upwards of two hours, tickets weren’t sold out during that time. Tickets should be first-come first-served. I made my request at 10:00 the second they went on sale. If the system had been working properly I would have tix. This is not a way to reward people’s diligent efforts to see their favorite artists. It should not be up to the luck of the draw as to whether the system will respond to your requests. The simple fact of the matter: Buy more server space. You are Live-fucking-Nation. You can’t afford to invest in your ticketing network?? Can’t you at least rent some extra server space on mornings you know people are going to swamp the system? This is ridiculous.
Adam Beasley
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11:10 A.M.
You following the LiveNation.com ticketing meltdown with Phish? With the amount of time they had and knowledge on load times for on-sales – this is the kind of issue that will haunt them for a while. Internet proves over and over that only one store rules each market: eBay / Amazon / iTunes …can they really replace Ticketmaster?
Tweetscan.com – search phish or livenation or just check out any music forum.
Ben Patterson
