Over the past couple of weeks, Twitter has been inundated with music fans complaining about how they’ve failed to purchase tickets for gigs and festivals online. Beyonce’s UK tour tickets allegedly sold out in just 10 minutes, with many fans posting on social media sites that they were unable to even access the home page of ticketing sites. This morning’s V Festival ticket sale also left wannabe festival goers in the cold as they struggled to reach sites to purchase tickets.
While the old fashioned system of having to turn up in person to buy tickets for events seems hugely out-dated now, there’s something to be said for the benefits of this archaic practise. Firstly, you knew exactly where you stood, literally, when you turned up to get in line. Straight away, it was clear to see how many people were ahead of you in the queue, and you could get an immediate indication of whether you were likely to be one of the lucky ones to get a ticket.
Online, while some sites have countdowns saying how long the wait might be (The Royal Opera House does this extremely well if you’re more in to your La Bohème than your Baby Boy), the majority of ticket sites leave fans in dark – frantically hitting the F5 refresh button in the hope of gaining access to select seats and make payments. When these attempts are unsuccessful, people quickly take to Twitter to vent frustrations, which can sometimes reflect badly on the ticketing site if it crashed under demand.
While Twitter seems to have wised up to this problem – sightings of the infamous “Fail Whale” are now becoming few and far between – it seems that ticketing sites still have a long way to go to prepare for and cope with the inevitable influx of visitors when popular tickets go on sale. I think I’d still rather take my chances online than physically lining up for tickets, but the system is far from perfect and the online world could learn a little from the first-come-first served principle.
Comments