Did You Get the Tickets?

We’re experiencing a problem processing your order. You will now be returned to the queue.

 

Forty-five minutes after tickets officially went on sale, I was finally able to select six seats, add them to my cart, and click the purchase button. As the little “processing” icon turned in a languid circle for longer than usual, I knew something had to be wrong. That’s when the message popped up, not just once, but thirteen times, as set after set of tickets were stripped from my cart, and I scrambled to get my hands on the next best thing. I felt myself being pushed around the stadium, tossed from section to section, farther from the stage, as the now meaningless “on-sale time” faded into the past. But I wasn’t even in the stadium yet; I was sitting at the desk in my home office. So, who the hell was doing all the pushing?

 

Months earlier, I had registered online as an “official fan”— an absurd and nauseating requirement that violates the very essence of listening to music—and entered the lottery for a chance to buy tickets. The good news arrived a couple weeks later, and I received a text with my individual code on the night before the on-sale date. I knew several others who hadn’t made it this far, so I felt the odds were with me. On the morning tickets were to be released, I followed Ticketmaster’s instructions to the letter:

 

9:15—I log into my ticketing account, double check that my credit card on file is up to date and take out a bit of work to flip through as I keep one eye on the clock, checking ever more carefully as 10:00 a.m. draws near.

9:50—I clear my desk, make sure my mouse works properly, and copy my ticket code so I can instantly paste it into the box instead of fumbling my way through the jumble of letters and numbers. This is it. I’m minutes away from having six tickets to the Eras Tour, the biggest show of the decade. My daughter is going to be so happy.

10:00—Nothing happens. I check my phone to be sure the clock on my desktop is correct and start to worry that my broadband is inadequate, despite the high connection speeds for which I pay dearly each month.

10:02—Still nothing. I feel the urge to refresh my screen, but I’ve been warned against this, and I know I’ll be sent barreling back to the end of this nonexistent line. My gut tells me something is off, that some glitch in the system will block my entry while a sea of “official fans” flood the virtual gates, snatching up tickets at record speeds, only to resell them immediately at a ridiculous mark-up. We used to call it scalping. It used to be illegal. Now these vermin are my biggest competition, and the ticket agency is more than happy to accommodate them because it collects a second exorbitant service fee for the exact same tickets.

10:06— My screen freezes for a moment, glosses over in a brief, translucent cloud of white, then a box pops up, assuring me that I am currently in the queue where over 2000 people are somehow already ahead of me.​

“Over 2000.”​

It’s an offensive number, really. It could mean 2001, or 5000, or even 10,000. But people would log off if they saw such figures—I know I would. So, I sit there, held hostage by an imaginary number and a visual gauge, a representation of my place in line that does not move one spec from +2000 for well over fifteen minutes. It looks like the fuel gauge on the dashboard of a car, and right now it’s reading full, while I in turn feel quite the opposite. Forty minutes pass before the numbers finally start to tick down, and they do so in oddly specific chunks: 1,878 people ahead of me, 1,643 people ahead of me, 1,237, 986, 743.... Along with the decrease in numbers, the gauge creeps across the screen until it finally reaches empty and there are zero people in front of me. The world around me comes to a halt. Little do I know, the real misery—all the pushing and shoving—is about to begin.

 

When I was a teenager, buying tickets to a concert was wholesome, democratic, more of a preamble to the concert experience than some puzzle that needed to be solved. We’d be in the car headed to a friend’s house or sitting in our bedrooms sort of doing homework when the spot came on the radio. That deep, growling, monster truck voice belted out the name of the artist over a montage of their bigger hits, announcing the upcoming live appearance at a nearby venue. Tacked on the end was the clear, businesslike clarification: “Tickets on sale this Saturday at the venue box office, and all Ticketron and Ticketmaster locations.” It wasn’t about who had the fastest internet speed, or who could afford an $800 ticket before fees. We got in line, a real line, and we stood there overnight with other fans, people just like us, with faces, and personalities: newbies in band shirts and denim jackets—a choice they would regret in the predawn chill; the “cool guy” who tried to act like a Greaser from The Outsiders and whose girlfriend would bring him a bagel and coffee just after 7:00; the thirty-year-old weaving tall tales of having seen this or that band when so and so was still alive. Sure, some of us were ridiculous, but every last one of us was real. We stood there all night with a dozen other fans. As the sun rose, the crowd grew to thirty, maybe even fifty or a hundred, depending on the artist. But “over 2000” wasn’t even a conceivable number, and we all knew each other—at least a little bit—by the time the doors opened.

 

I was at a stoplight, maybe ten years ago, with my daughter in the passenger seat, when a car pulled up next to me on the right. The driver beeped, nodded his head, and as I nodded back, he turned right and drove off.

“Who was that?” my daughter asked.

“I forget his name,” I said. “Corey, or maybe Cody, I think. I met him one night waiting in line for Aerosmith tickets back in 1989.” She looked at me as though I were speaking in some foreign tongue.

“In line? Do you mean online? How do you meet someone online when you’re buying tickets?” She didn’t get it. For her entire life she had seen me buying tickets to concerts, sporting events, movies, theme parks, all from my desktop computer—and then eventually from an app on my phone. I’d be raking leaves out in the yard on a Saturday morning in October, come in a little before 10:00 a.m. for a coffee and drink it at my desk while I clicked through a ticket page. By the time my cup was empty, we had tickets to whatever, and I was headed back outside to continue the yardwork. It was inconceivable to her that someone might stand in a line overnight and somehow form a bond with people over their mutual respect for a rock band. In truth, if I had been pulled over to the side of the road fixing a flat tire, I have no doubt that Corey (or maybe Cody) would have pulled over and offered to help. I know I would do the same for him.

 

I bought those tickets at Video to Go, our neighborhood rental shop, which doubled as a licensed Ticketmaster location until it eventually disappeared with all the other video stores. A year earlier, when I bought tickets for the first time, I was only fifteen and hadn’t yet discovered how early to arrive, so I was nowhere near the front of the line. Twenty minutes before tickets went on sale, Mike, the store manager, came outside with a pocket notepad in his hand and had us line up along the side of the building.

“Ok, everybody, listen up,” he said. “We can pull tickets out of the machine a lot quicker than we can cash you out at the register. If you let me know how many you want, I can start pulling them in batches as soon as the system opens at ten. I can’t guarantee you tickets, but I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at this.”

Even with Mike looking out for us—he was breaking some sort of rule, I’m sure—I worried the show might still sell out before I had my tickets. They started letting people inside—a few at a time—right at ten o’clock. As I inched closer to the door, the people from the front of the line started to come out, grinning ear to ear, their tickets already tucked safely away as they retreated to their cars and drove off. When I stepped inside, I saw Mike printing tickets in batches and lining them up in neat little stacks behind the counter. He was way ahead of the cashier, just as he said he’d be, and when I got to the front of the line, the cashier had my tickets ready to go. I handed my $80 over the counter, and she passed me the envelope with four freshly printed tickets tucked into one corner and artfully fanned out so I could see just a little bit of each one.

 

Thanks to Mike, I got those tickets thirty minutes before the show sold out. Over the next several years—once I realized what time to arrive—he made sure I was in the first few rows as often as possible. I’ve caught a few guitar picks, high fived a couple band members, and had beer spilled on me by my musical idols. More importantly, I still have every single one of those ticket stubs, from that very first concert in 1988, right up until tickets went fully digital a few years back, each one a small, rectangular time machine, each with a story to tell, each far more fascinating than the pictures I take and then delete a few months later when I need to free up some storage on my phone.

 

So, what happened? When did it all go sour? How were all the Mikes of the world—who did everything they could to get us the best seats in the house—replaced by a computer glitch that kicked me out of a virtual line thirteen times? The shift was insidious, as most manipulation tends to be. The digital world crept in like a virus, infecting the most personal experience we could have with our favorite music. It’s the price we pay for the illusion of convenience. We don’t have to line up in the cold anymore; we can buy tickets from the warmth and safety of our home (or maybe even at work if they go on sale on a Tuesday morning); we can even pick the exact seats we are about to purchase. But in turn, we don’t meet people like Corey or Cody; we don’t walk away holding our first souvenir, before the show even happens; we don’t get a fair chance to put in the work and get really good at the art of buying tickets, good enough to be right in front of the stage just because of our dedication to the concert experience.

 

Did I ever get those tickets to the Eras Tour? Somehow, I did. On my fourteenth attempt, I finally completed my purchase. I shelled out $1200 for six tickets, face value after fees, and my daughter was happy—as I knew she would be. The production value was through the roof, and we got rained on for several hours, through both opening acts and throughout the main event (I’m told it’s a good thing somehow). In the weeks prior, the world was in a frenzy over the outrageous price of resale tickets—all sold by those “official fans” of course.

Two days before the show I saw six tickets in the same section as mine listed for $25,000 on a resale site. I don’t know who has that kind of money lying around, but the ticket agencies are very much aware of you and really appreciate that you’ve helped to spread the infection.