In what could be the biggest Ticketmaster debacle this side of Bruce Springsteen, thousands of LCD Soundsystem fans hoping to score tickets to the band's final concert at Madison Square Garden on April 2nd were completely shut out this morning as the show sold out in milliseconds among allegations of technical glitches and scalper fraud. When LCD Soundsystem first announced their MSG show, we wondered if the group had the following to graduate from mid-sized theaters to the World's Greatest Arena, and doubted the show would come close to selling out. Well, it's sold out, but not without a lot of controversy and uproar.
Where to begin? Let's start at 11 a.m. EST, when tickets were supposed to go on sale, a few days after Wednesday's pre-sale, which was itself a little controversial. While a handful of fans were able to penetrate the on-sale screen at the scheduled time today, countless more were faced with a screen that said tickets were not on sale yet. Roughly five minutes later, the screen allowing purchases was refreshed, but by then the tickets were long gone. According to the outrage in the comments section of the Brooklyn Vegan blog, of the few who managed to get tickets, only those who purchased with American Express gold cards were able to lock down seats. Others -- The Amp included -- were immediately greeted with "Sorry, no exact matches were found, but other tickets may still be available."
LCD mastermind James Murphy himself was in disbelief over the fans' inability to score tickets, writing on Twitter "ok... did ANYone get a ticket? S---. please tell me? #gotaticket" and minutes later, "seriously--NO ONE? NO ONE on here?" While LCD fans were bruising their fingers typing in those nonsensical Captchas, Murphy's bud Aziz Ansari was least providing some comic relief thanks to his tweets "Trick #33 for @lcdsoundsystem tix: Get tickets for Trey Songz at MSG tonight, stay hidden until April 2nd" and "Is it true Mubarak stepped down just for a sec to try to go on Ticketmaster to get tickets to see @lcdsoundsystem at MSG?" While fans were able to find some common unity and humor in the fact that none of them were getting tickets, at the end of the day, they weren't getting tickets.
The Internet works in vindictive ways, so our own scientifically unproven, conspiracy-happy theory is that, after Murphy went on a tirade on Twitter after the Wednesday pre-sale -- at one point, he threatened to go after the scalpers -- the scalping community banded together. Using their ticket-swallowing technology that is still too elusive for Ticketmaster to combat, we surmise they completely bought up the vast majority of available tickets for the general public on-sale, making it a must for LCD fans to pay well over face value to see the band's final show. (There are over 650 tickets on StubHub at press time, including 50 pit tickets priced at $3,500 apiece.) Again, this is just a theory, and while it might sound a bit out there, it's the most plausible explanation we can think of, outside of the possibility that LCD Soundsystem really sold out Madison Square Garden in under a minute.