Most people expected Wilco tickets to go fast for their upcoming show at the Durham Performing Arts Center, but 17 minutes is a bit shocking. The show, slated for Saturday, March 27, set a DPAC record for fastest sell out ever with that 17 minute sell. DPAC general manager Bob Klauss is said "The DPAC staff and I will work hard to make sure we’re great hosts to the very lucky 2,700 fans who got tickets to this special show.”So kudos to you lucky folks that secured tickets. A good night is coming your way. Check out Wilco's upcoming tour dates here.
[UPDATE: David Meconi of the N&O received a response from Wilco's people about ticket sales for the DPAC show. Check that out here. He says that 2,566 of the 2,700 tickets were distributed through proper channels.]
6 comments:
This is a little deceiving since both DPAC and Wilco had pre-sales before the public onsale on Friday. I would surmise that there weren't a lot of tickets to be sold at that point. Still cool, though.
Practically every show of a certain size has a pre-sale these days. Most have a limited number of tickets though, so there were likely many tickets still available when they went on sale on Friday.
You make a fair point though that the 17 minute sell out isn't 100% accurate, but according to DPAC, it's still their fastest sell out ever.
These numbers are from Saturday afternoon but still highlight how much horseshit this is.
TicketsNow, a wholly owned Ticketmaster subsidiary
(http://www.ticketsnow.com/InventoryBrowse/Wilco-Tickets-at-Durham-Performing-Arts-Center-in-Durham), had 146 tickets total for sale yesterday between $74 and $306 each of this "sold out" show.
CenterStage Seats, which is throwing links on craigslist (http://centerstageseats.com/ResultsTicket.aspx?evtid=1269128&event=Wilco) had 276 tickets as of yesterday for between $100 and $558.
Then there's the eBay owned StubHub (http://www.stubhub.com/wilco-tickets/wilco-durham-durham-performing-arts-center-3-27-2010-926990/) which had at least 316 tickets for $75 to $308.
And there were 25 or so on eBay for between $50 and $200 each.
There's nearly 763 seats of a 2700-seat capacity venue accounted for right now, which is nearly a third of total possible seats available.
These are numbers from just three different secondary sales sites that I have heard about, not counting tickets that haven't yet been made available on secondary sales sites or are being sold on sites I've never heard of.
There will be a batch of tickets that will be made available just before the show. How many? No one knows. How many were allocated to the DPAC presale? How many to Wilco? How many at the box office (where I paid exactly $35 each with no tax or additional fees or charge where they also printed out real paper tickets at no additional charge amazingly enough)? After getting burned by both websites during the pre-sales, I decided to drive to the DPAC and wait. I was maybe 10th person in line and checked ticketmaster.com from my phone at 10:06 and there were no tickets available. People in line a few spots ahead of me were unable to buy blocks of 4 or more seats together because they were unavailable.
I know a lot of people that were completely unable to get tickets despite trying to get in on both pre-sales and the general sale. Still, of course, a third of the tickets were purchased and are being scalped at ridiculous prices by those with no intention of actually attending the show.
Thanks for the due diligence digging up all of these numbers. Scalpers are definitely a blight on the concert industry and needs to be squashed. A lot of it is aided by ticketing companies, promoters and tour acts (not that I would suspect Wilco would be one of them). The 700+ is quite a bit high though because many of the listings on TicketsNow, StubHub and CenterStage are identical, so they're scalpers trying to move one set of tickets on multiple sites for a quick sale. You're right that there will be more scalper tickets released in the future though and tickets that are held for the band, press and other persons will be released prior to the show.
We're going to check with DPAC about this issue though and hopefully we'll get a response that we'll pass on to our readers soon.
Still, it frustrates me that there are so many tickets being resold (on a site for which the primary ticket reseller gets a cut on top of the $10.58 markup) and that fans who did what they were "supposed to do" and waited til 10 am on Friday that seemed to have the odds so stacked against them.
The DPAC presale through TicketMaster was for "Friends of the DPAC" and was advertised via email but had no other criteria for purchase. NewRaleigh.com published the URL so anyone could have gotten in on that one. The Wilco presale only requires knowing that Wilco does a presale and registering on their website.
I'm not accusing anyone of anything (except that TicketMaster stinks, which everyone already knows), but it just feels like there is something unfair about the system.
Booth Amphitheater in Cary, where they played last locally, has a 7000-person capacity. I'm not sure if that sold out at all but I remember tickets being pretty easy to get so probably not unless it sold out the day of the show.
I was able to get 4 tickets in Wilco presale in 3rd row. Wilco states they get about 10% of venue seats for presale. I have to pick my tickets up at window. Maybe the way is to have all tickets will call.
I have followed band for about 8 years and have always been able to get seats to their shows.
Nice that DPAC has no other charges. That might be where all the scalpers go to keep the cost low.
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