Kraftwerk Tickets Blues

Computer Hate: 

No One Got Kraftwerk Tickets

 

Be careful MoMA and Showclix: you have made Kraftwerk fans angry. In the midst of today’s massive ticket-selling fiasco for the band’s eight full-album shows at the museum, someone commented on BrooklynVegan the inputs for all of us keeping score on our calculator watches:

The entire generation tried to buy two tickets each out of 8×500=4,000 tickets (im guessing place can hold about 500 people).
so, just about 5-10% chance that any of us will get them. which still makes me unlucky, as i had 12 people on Gchat and none of us got tickets.

That number was almost right: Showclix, which is known for pioneering mobile ticketing and online queuing, reported 50,000 individual connections by nostalgic synth heads, half an hour after the queue (stampede) began at noon on its website. That, MoMA had indicated, would be the only place to secure tickets. But it turned out that the server wasn’t capable of keeping the queue intact, or even loading a webpage. And, apparently, there was another way to get tickets, as some intrepid old-fashioned types discovered: by picking up a telephone.

By 12:55, reports Nokturnalist, only tickets to the performance of Radio-Activity were available (all tickets were two per person at $25 each). Around the time someone fake Retweeted Kim Kardashian boasting about getting tickets for the “Autobahn” show, @Showclix also made Twitter mad, with a dismissive note reminder that refreshing “won’t help u”:

It may not have been embarrassing for the ticket company or for MoMA (or for Volkswagon, which is sponsoring this little tour, a tour that ought to become a larger one with larger venues). But the system failure should be a disgrace for the band that figured out how to put computers into cool music. Unless of course ShowClix is still using only “Computer Love”-era machines. Which still wouldn’t be funny, even if our fragile emotional chips could handle it.

o