Concert Ticket Frustration

I am a big fan of the band Arcade Fire. They are playing here in March. The tickets went 'on sale' here last Friday at 9.00am. Myself and 5 of my friends attempted to get tickets online - separately each with broadband connections - but the concert was advertised as sold out within seconds. A second date was then added and this too sold out within seconds. Neither I, nor my 5 friends got within a sniff of a ticket. I have since spoken to 6 more people who were similarly unsuccessful through the internet site. I also had a friend who was physically outside a ticketmaster outlet at 8.50am on Friday morning and was told when the shop opened that they had no access to tickets.

Now I can understand that a popular concert can sell out very quickly and lots of people can be disappointed. What I can;t understand is how e-bay sellers in the UK currently have pictures of tickets for sale for the Dublin concerts. Pictures! Needless to say the prices are extortionate. But how, given the experience of myself and my friends above, can someone in the UK physically have tickets???????? I think the whole ticketmaster thing stinks to the high heavens. Anyone else had similar experiences?

heya, i logged in to ticket master at 8.45 to get tickets and the first show sold out by 9.02, luckily managed to get two tickets to the second show,but i dont know what way they allocate them, as a friend tried at exactly the same time as me, and had in fact logged in earlier than me, and got none.

I assume people in the uk can buy ticketmaster tickets the same way we can, at shops, or else a bit of photoshop was used!

There is a story today in the Sunday Tribune about this. Apparently it was due to a error by the promoters which allowed people to purchase large amounts of tickets rather than the usual maximum of 6.

This type of issue has been raised before. There are so many strange elements about the way tickets are allocated that some people believe something unfair is going on, but it hard to establish whether this type of thing is just 'unfair' or whether there is some breach of terms and conditions or the law involved.

The Ticketmaster response that there was a glitch is technically possible (although it is more like human error than the comuter error they blamed) but even assuming there were some people who were surprised and happy to see that they could buy 50 tickets within seconds, do people really think they would shell out €1,500 totally out of the blue on the gamble that they could resell them at a profit ? Maybe 4 tickets, or maybe even 10 tickets, but who in their right mind would buy 50 for resale ? It just doesn't compute.

Then they add a second concert within minutes . . . and it sells out too ? Pull the other one. Arcade Fire may well be popular, but that popular ?

The tickets for sale on ebay within seconds is an old one. My previous experience with this was for tickets for a concert here which according to Ticketmaster were only for sale in 1s or 2s. Within minutes of the concert going on sale and selling out, I could have bought them on ebay. Technically possible, and possibly legal, but in this particular instance the seller indicated that he had a further two adjacent seats. So, he had 4 in a row for a concert where you could only buy 2 at a time. Go figure that one out.

z