Phish: Red Rocks Ticket Snafu

TICKETMASTER RELEASES TICKETS EARLY, THEN CANCELS ORDERS

While tickets for Phish‘s Red Rocks Amphitheatre shows weren’t set to go on sale until March 26, alert fans realized that Ticketmaster was selling 4-day passes last night. Rather than a surprise for true believers, this was a system error and the orders were quickly cancelled.

Phish issued the following statement on their site this afternoon:

Last night we learned Ticketmaster mistakenly put on sale a substantial number of four-day passes to Phish’s concerts this summer at Red Rocks Amphitheater, giving some fans an unfair advantage to purchase tickets ahead of the March 26th publicly announced on sale date. Ticketmaster has fully acknowledged this significant error, and to make sure that all of our fans have the same, fair opportunity to purchase tickets to this event, they have cancelled all of these orders with all charges being refunded.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause our fans. We are in active dialogue with Ticketmaster to push them to address the inconvenience their error has caused.

Phish takes this and all ticketing matters extremely seriously. We will seek assurances this type of error will not happen again in the future. The high demand for the tickets on Phish’s return has overwhelmed the prevailing ticketing systems and revealed their flaws. We are putting pressure on the ticketing providers to improve their systems. We are focused on the ticket broker activity in our tickets and the inability of the existing ticket systems to stop this. We are actively seeking options to limit this.

As a reminder, the public on sale date for Red Rocks is Thursday, March 26th at 12:00 Noon Mountain time and additionally Phish’s ticket request period will remain open until 11:59PM eastern time this Sunday the 22nd. Please visit phish.portals.musictoday.com/ to request tickets.

Thank you for your continued support.

Here’s a sampling of the chatter this glitch has stirred up:

Rolling Stone article

Glide Magazine article

So, Phans are left to cross their fingers and hope that come March 26 that ticket sales go smoother than the they did for the Hampton run.

In the meantime, here’s “Fluffhead” from the recently released Clifford Ball DVD to calm our nerves.