Glastonbury resale update

This is probably as sweetly a heartbreaking tweet as you could ever expect to see, from the official Glastonbury feed:

We're getting tweets from lots of you who *are* managing to get tickets, so it is working. And there are more tickets left. Pls keep trying.

If you're having to use another service to beg your potential customers to keep trying to use your sales service, it isn't, in any sense, "working".

Glastonbury resale: It's happening now

How can you tell that the resale of leftover Glastonbury tickets is going on right now?

Because the SeeTickets infrastructure is falling over.

You can try and get on.

To be fair, at the moment it does appear to be failing gracefully, giving this message:

Sorry, this site is currently receiving very high volumes of traffic. You're seeing this holding page because we've reached the maximum number of transactions we are able to handle at one time.

You are being held at this holding page until a space on the booking page becomes available.

This holding page will automatically refresh every 20 seconds to try to obtain access to the booking page. (You can also manually press refresh if you choose.

That's some sort of improvement, I suppose.

Apparently you should just sit and take it

@Glastowatch is annoyed about people expressing their frustration:

And so begins the moaning

They link through to a Facebook group which more-or-less grunts its frustration:

glasto ticket fiasco thousands left unhappy people gloating about getting 16 on one person ACCOUNT YET 1000'S TURNED AWAY PREHISTORIC COMPUTER SYSTEM 1 COMPANY TO HANDLE IT..SURELY THIS IS AGAINST WHAT THE TRUE MEANING OF GLASTONBURY IS...JOKE IS NO BETTER THAN TESCO A FILTHY GIANT

Is that really "moaning"? Isn't it understandable frustation? Sure, not everyone who wants tickets will get tickets, but is it really necessary to force them to spend hours on a Sunday morning battering a fallen-over computer system in order to let them down? Is it moaning to expect a company selling tickets that cost well over a hundred quid - and who extracts a healthy 'booking' fee - actually works? Does Glastowatch really think you should just shut up and shrug?

Perhaps if someone took notice of the 'moaning' in the previous years, there wouldn't be a bunch of these ungrateful, whining ticketless ingrates around now?

[UPDATE: This post originally started with a reference to Michael Eavis attacking Seetickets, which was actually me being duped by a fake account.]

Glastonbury 2011: SeeTickets still isn't up to the job

Although less of a nightmare than in previous years, it still seems from Twitter that the Glastonbury ticket process is still a rotten, tumbling mess:

@Jack_Dent:

# Wasted a Sunday morning trying to book my lad a Glastonbury ticket. Think he may have just got 1 via a mate. The booking system is shite.

@glastofest oh great thanks, the bloody See tickets website is still not working #glastonburysucks 10 minutes ago via web in reply to glastofest

@glastofest errrno, it times out. it's a useless, frustrating system. No worries though, you'll sell all the tickets!! about 3 hours ago via web in reply to glastofest

@JackHCarter:

trying get a glastonbury ticket takes the PISS

@newmusicdave:

Sold out! Never even got on the website. That's 2 yrs in a row now. Waste of time #Glastonbury

How many years now have they been selling exclusively online, and they still can't get the system to work properly?

What's interesting, though, this year is that it's not just the fans taking to Twitter to attack Seetickets for being useless:
@MichaelEavis:

See tickets have indeed let us down today I'm sorry but there will be another sale of cancelled tickets in 2011. Still some left now though

If even Michael Eavis, a man who can't see a mudbath without pointing out the rejuvenating properties of Somerset clay, is saying Seetickets isn't up to the job, why are Glastonbury still using them?

[UPDATE: Oh. That turns out not to be an actual Michael Eavis account. Sorry; thanks to the comments which pointed that out.]

Reading-Leeds: The servers melt again

There are some things which are obviously always going to happen. Like Peter Barlow's drinking getting him and his strange child-unit into serious bother. Like Boris Johnson's cabinet of skellingtons being paraded up and down the street. And like the launch of tickets for festivals being bungled by the organisations responsible for them.

Mike E emailed about 6.40 to report that seetickets had collapsed - twenty minutes before the Reading-Leeds NME tickets presale was due to start.

I feel a little responsible, what with starting rumours that George Sampson would be headlining.

Elsewhere on the web, there's the usual complaints caused by an apparent inability on the part of ticket companies to predict popularity:

They're pretty much all sold out. How people get through I don't know, because I've been trying everything since 3 minutes to 7! & it pisses me off to see tickets on ebay already. If you're not going, don't bloody buy them! I swear they probably won't make much of a profit after ebay & paypal fees anyway. Grrr

Caused by the inability to design a system which degrades gracefully:

reading festival organisation is such bullshit this year. no tickets on the box office? tickets onsale at hmv at 7pm instead of the following morning? so. much. bullshit.

doesn't matter much to me, because i already got my ticket last year. & will continue to do so every year from now on, because it is IMPOSSIBLE to get them online. i was there, on the dot, at 7pm, refreshing four different ticket sites to buy a ticket for my friend. i was clicking for half an hour, & i didn't get through once. bull. shit.

And, I suspect, there's going to be more complaints when people start to see this sort thing popping up all over the place:

viagogo is Europe's largest ticket exchange, where fans can buy & sell tickets for live events and they are the ONLY official ticket resale partner for the Leeds and Reading Festivals.

Use voucher code VGG762 before April 19th and get 5% off the price of your tickets.

Meanwhile, more of the line-up has appeared on NME.com:

Main Stage
Kings Of Leon
Kaiser Chiefs
Placebo
Fall Out Boy
Funeral For A Friend
Deftones

READING SATURDAY (29)/ LEEDS FRIDAY (28)

Main Stage
Arctic Monkeys
The Prodigy
Maximo Park
Ian Brown
Courteeners

READING SUNDAY (30)/ LEEDS SATURDAY (29)

Main stage
Radiohead
Bloc Party
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Vampire Weekend
Brand New

The Kings Of Leon? Are you sure? Sure, the Sunday line-up looks pretty good, and you're not going hear complaints from here about Placebo. But The Kings Of Leon? Are they blackmailing somebody? Are they working undercover and need to be included at the top of the bill of every festival to help their cover stories?

Did Seetickets collapse under the weight of cancels?

Reading/Leeds: Monkeys on top

NME is reporting that the Arctic Monkeys will headline this year's Reading Festival, which obligates them to do the same for the Leeds Festival as well.

NME.com is going to unveil the rest of the bill this evening at 7pm, and, simultaneously, will be selling tickets via Seetickets. You'd think they'd have put the tickets on sale ten minutes later, so that you could read who's playing before joining the log-in rush. After all, if it's Spandau Ballet on Saturday night, and George Sampson headlining the second stage every night, you might think twice about investing your cash.

Tickets, please. Please, please, please.

Martin over at Currybetdotnet attempts to buy Depeche Mode tickets from the lovely people at Ticketmaster. It's not a happy experience; it makes you wonder if anyone at Ticketmaster has ever tried to buy things online, never mind from their own store.

On a related note, in the current edition of the BBC's in-house magazine Ariel, an enraged member of staff asks how come SeeTickets was charging not just a £2.50 booking fee, but also a £4.80 "transaction fee" on top of Oasis Electric Proms tickets - the £4.80 to cover "secure delivery" of tickets that, erm, you had to pick up from the venue.

The Official Response from Lorna Clarke, the director of the Electric Proms, stresses how important it was to make sure the tickets didn't end up being sold on eBay or anything (even although the security measures mean that legitimate purchasers are punished by having to jump through hoops to see the event they've paid for) before announcing a "partial" refund.

This misses the broader point about why the gig-goers are being charged at all a separate fee to cover the costs of security for the tickets - it seems to be an odd notion that to avoid people being ripped off and made to pay inflated prices, you, erm, inflate the price but hide it from the headline charge. Why not go the whole hog and slap an extra ten quid 'support band fee' on the transaction?

SeeTickets hail failed Glastonbury ticket process as success

The permanent revolution of joy that is the Glastonbury PR machine has hailed yet another victory, with SeeTickets placing a spun story to Gigwise hailing a "70% increase" in ticket sales, week-on-week, for the festival:

Martin Fitzgerald, the general manager of Seetickets, the festivals official ticket agency, told Gigwise that the renewed “buzz and excitement” was inevitable.

“People realise that they don’t want to be watching it on TV, wishing they were there, they actually want to be there and experience the festival in all it’s glory,” Fitzgerald said.

“A lot of people were telling us that they were desperate to go but just couldn’t afford it at the moment. Being allowed to book by Credit Card has certainly helped some people.”

Interestingly, Fitzgerald doesn't reveal how many tickets he's actually talking about - it could be last week they sold ten, and this week they've sold seventeen; if they were selling tickets in their hundreds last week then the situation was worse than anyone had imagined.

Still, it's amusing to watch a company responsible for flogging tickets for a festival with a recent tradition of selling out in hours trumpeting that they've still got loads to sell a few days before the event. Victory, comrades, it's all victory.

Where your booking fee goes

At least when you fork out your hard-earned quids in booking fees to the likes of SeeTickets, you at least have the comfort of knowing you're investing in a top-quality service provided by an international company with a fine reputation. (The dodgy misuse of Glastonbury registrant's data aside, of course.)

Or maybe not. The Klaxons have had to apologise to fans who were locked out of last night's Manchester gig after Ticketline and SeeTickets screwed up and sent the wrong tickets out:

"We would like to apologise to any genuine ticket holders who did not get in. If anyone had a valid ticket for either show but was not let in, we ask that in the first instance they should contact the ticket agent from who they bought tickets with ticket numbers and booking reference. The ticket agent will then be able to check if tickets were sent out and how they slipped through the net."

Actually, shouldn't SeeTickets and/or Ticketline have details of what they sent to who? Shouldn't they be the ones who are contacting their customers and sorting out their mess, rather than the other way round?

Mean Fiddler accused of misusing Glastonbury registration data

Back when the registration procedure for Glastonbury was announced, we did wonder about what privacy guarantees were in place to protect all this juicy, valuable information.

It turns out none, as Mike Eccleshall has forwarded onto us a spam email that's been making use of the list of names:

From: donotreply@latitudefestival.co.uk
Date: Apr 30, 2007 3:21 PM
Subject: Latitude Music Festival
To: *****

Dear Festival Goer,

I'm sorry you were unable to get a ticket to Glastonbury this year. I hope there will be another chance for you to come during the next four years. Of course there's always BBC TV and radio to keep you in touch with the music that will be going on around the various stages.

Can I suggest that you might like to look at the possibility of going to another festival---namely the Latitude Festival, set in a beautiful part of Suffolk. Although much smaller it has some terrific music and has a similar feel to it by way of theatre comedy circus and much more.

Tickets are available at http://www.seetickets.com/?a=latitu&filler2=g

Best wishes and thank you so much for supporting our Festival

Latitude Festival

Mike's response is worth reading, too:

Dear Mean Fiddler / Latitude Festival / Glastonbury Festival,

I did not register for Glastonbury 2007 tickets to receive SPAM from (other) Mean Fiddler festivals.

Your email (copied below) does not contain an unsubscribe link, nor was an opt out option available at time of registration and is thus, under the terms of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, subsection 22 (C)'. illegal

(c) the recipient has been given a simple means of refusing (free of charge except for the costs of the transmission of the refusal) the use of his contact details for the purposes of such direct marketing, at the time that the details were initially collected, and, where he did not initially refuse the use of the details, at the time of each subsequent communication.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032426.htm

Please remove this address from all mean fiddler mailings immediately.

Please also reply at the earliest possible time with the relevant section of the Glastonbury Festival Ticket Pre-Registration Terms and Conditions which state that I have agreed to be contacted by you in relation to other commercial offers. Failure to do this will leave me no choice but to report this, massive (circa 400,000?) unsolicited mailing to the relevant Data Protection Commissioners.

Glastonbury Festival: Mean Fiddler have let you down.

Interestingly, they've broken Michael Eavis' word. It's been taken down from the official Glastonbury site now, but originally the tickets page had an assaurance from Eavis:

"I assure you that your details will not be used for any other purpose"
No information collected by registration will be offered for sale or use by any third party organisation. Unsuccessful ticket applicants will have their data destroyed and all ticket holders’ registration details and photos will be destroyed within one month of the event.

... but not before we've sent out ticket applications for Latitude.